Show HN: Codebeat – automated code review for Swift | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Codebeat – automated code review for Swift

codebeat.co

68 pointsfishnchips9 comments

So, am I missing something or is it just hosted static analysis?

I don't know about the static analysis competitors for the particular set of languages they support, but this tool is incredibly bare-bones. If you're looking to use static analysis (and it is a great contributor to code quality), shop around. We pay for quite a few such tools, and while I'm not suggesting everyone ought to rush out and drop a pretty penny on Coverity, I'd be surprised if you couldn't find a better bang for your buck than this one.

    > So, am I missing something or is it just hosted static
    > analysis?

I guess 'SAaaS' isn't the best name or tagline!

I'm also not sure if "just" is fair - it looks like there's GitHub/Bitbucket integration, for checking PRs too. In which case of course hosted makes sense.

It's also free for public repos, while CodeClimate is free local-only, so it's a bit of a different offering; better for the hobbyist from that perspective at least.

I'd like to think that static analysis is just 'how' and not 'what' we do. Unlike most hosted solutions I know we use our own algorithms rather than provide wrappers around assorted open-source linters. This should ideally allow us to flag more and more things over time. For now you are right that the tool is fairly bare-bones. But I think it's best to launch and iterate.

Nowhere on the page does it show how it does these automatic code reviews. What is it using to determine this 'GPA' score for a repository? Is it configurable?

Yeah, this is an impressively low information landing page. From reading every page I could find a link to I've discovered that they generate a chart based on something or other... and that's it. I guess they're a $20/month meaningless-line-chart-as-a-service startup, since there's zero details about what the product actually does.

They sure do have the "talk about how awesome we are" part down, though.

OP here, and one of the folks behind the app. Irony aside I'm glad we did the marketing part right. We need to work on communicating technicalities though. We do static analysis BTW.

I'm one of the people behind codebeat, we have docs (https://help.codebeat.co/docs/software-quality-metrics) explaining the analysis and metrics in more details - have a look.

Thanks for the link - that is a thorough documentation. However, given that codebeat is a product targeted towards developers, I find it confusing that the landing page does not even try to define GPA or what 'code quality' means.

Thats really valuable feedback, expect updates soon :)

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