UPDATE, 2023-09-16: Heroku dropped support for free plans in November 2022, so the web app described below is dead now. But CWG has followed LWG’s lead and provided their own subpages! As of 2023, you can navigate directly to cplusplus.github.io/CWG/issues/1234.html. So you don’t need my dead app anyway.

Several weeks ago I made a thing: cwg-issue-browser.herokuapp.com/cwg1234 is a faster way to browse WG21 Core Working Group issues by number than the official URL www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/cwg_defects.html#1234. Because rather than loading and re-rendering 4 megabytes of text every time you load an issue, this little Heroku app caches those 4 megabytes on the server side and just sends over the little piece you’re interested in.

Subsequent page loads (in the 30-minute window before the app goes to sleep again) don’t even need to re-fetch the 4 megabytes. So if you’ve already clicked on the first link above and been unimpressed, maybe you’ll be more impressed when you click on cwg-issue-browser.herokuapp.com/cwg2345.

Props to WG21’s LWG for proactively splitting up their issues list into sub-megabyte subpages: cplusplus.github.io/LWG/issue1234 loads super fast.

As usual, the source code is available on my GitHub.

I used the same python+flask+heroku incantations that I’d previously used for co.py.cat. For writing little web applications like this, I [used to] highly recommend Heroku!