Announcing Sourcegraph 2.0 | Hacker News Reader

Announcing Sourcegraph 2.0

about.sourcegraph.com

83 pointsjoeyespo29 comments

Looks pretty slick! Requested early access to the editor.

I'm still not a fan of Electron apps. I'd rather they at the very least be offline Chrome apps, so then I'd at least be using the latest Blink/V8 combo. Not to mention it seems that anything Chromium-based likes to make a ton of little writes to disk for just about everything (even when I'm just moving my mouse across the page), so to have multiple apps doing that with their own respective config/cache directories is annoying.

That said, VS Code is the least bad editor running on top of Electron that I've used, so I'm glad this one is based on it. :)

This looks great. Sourcegraph is slowly and steadily making tangible some ideas that are hard to explain. Whenever I wear their shirts I get asked what they do, and I have a one-liner, but it's really hard to comprehend the scale and scope of what they're really trying to accomplish. Really looking forward to using the editor!

What is your one-liner? I haven't figured out a great way to succinctly describe Sourcegraph.

They are an interesting company and I'm positive your endorsement is genuine. It might be worth mentioning that they sponsor one of your projects just to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

I tell people they're building the global graph of source code.

People without any theoretical background will look confused, but CS people generally understand the deeper implications of this, I think.

I've been supportive of their mission for years, well before any sponsorship. My (unofficial) relationship with Sourcegraph isn't about money. We have shared values, pure and simple.

Sourcegraph CEO here. Thanks, Matt!

For the tangible stuff today, check out https://about.sourcegraph.com.

For our long-term vision (the stuff he's referring to), check out our master plan: https://about.sourcegraph.com/plan.

Sourcegraph CEO here. Thanks for posting this. Happy to answer any questions here. We're really excited to start helping with the code editing and review workflow as well.

Hi! Big fan of your work here. My question is: What do you think about Kythe, the open-source version of Google's Grok (https://github.com/google/kythe)? In the context of both your overall vision, and of strategies: Do you do things similarly? Do you see collaboration/integration there as desirable?

That's a good question. They've built an amazing system. Google and ex-Google engineers love the code intelligence/search systems that Google has, and those are powered by Kythe and related systems inside Google. At a product level, many ex-Googlers miss those systems in their new companies and fill the gap by setting up Sourcegraph internally.

Tech-wise, Kythe is optimized for offline analysis, and we use servers that speak LSP (https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol), which is built for online analysis and use while you're editing code. That is what I see as the main difference. We would love for the approaches to converge, or for the representation/configuration to be compatible.

I think online analysis is the way to go, for those of us using non-google-sized codebases. Of the many tools I feel programmers are missing in order to clean up the mess we're making, Sourcegraph is trending towards several of them - keep up the good work!

Sourcecode server? Can I take some credit for the name :P

Looking forward to trying it out.

What’s the response to the single search box so far? I quite like it but one of the reasons I have never implemented one for searchcode is that the vast majority of users were confused by it when I tested it with them.

> Sourcecode server? Can I take some credit for the name :P

I realize you're semi-joking, but wanted to note that I don't think it's a particularly original/unique/secret name

Totally joking. The sourcegraph guys know who I am and I bear them no ill will. That said I do run searchcode and the downloadable version is named searchcode server (launched a year ago) hence the joke about the name.

Ha ha. I liked it. You'll need to call your editor the Boyditor.

I love the product myself a lot. I am currently a student who tries to contribute large open source stuff and been using it to track code for a few months.

Glad to hear that!

The Sourcegraph Editor is a fork of vscode? Is it not possible to implement it with an extension? Happily would install an extension but i'm not sure whether i would switch the editor

Sourcegraph CEO here. The Sourcegraph Editor features (on https://about.sourcegraph.com/products/editor, plus other things on the roadmap that aren't on that page) are currently not possible to build as an extension.

One of two things will happen, assuming we build a great product (which is obviously our intent :):

1. We will prove that these features are valuable, and VS Code and other editors will eventually add support (or extensibility) for them. Then we could just ship extensions. Everyone wins. And our customers and business do well because we have a great server product for companies needing to scale up code intelligence and code reviews beyond what can run locally—the backend for all these editors that now support these new code intelligence and review features.

2. We'll prove these features are valuable, but other editors don't add them (or the extensibility to support them). Then we'll continue shipping a first-class standalone editor with support for these features, and developers who need these features will use that editor. The world will have one additional editor. For developers that don't use that editor, we'll build lightweight extensions for other editors with some of the functionality (and that make it easy to jump to our app from other editors).

I don't know which will come true, but I do know that either way, we as a company need to demonstrate that these things are valuable to developers in their editor. That's what we're focused on now. :)

This is good, I do not want this as a VSCode extension because I do not use VSCode. If you could build it right into Jetbrains, though... maybe.

I would be concerned about how it would integrate and would probably still prefer a separate application instead of a docked or pull-out frame.

What are your thoughts on editor preferences for developers? If a company wanted to adopt Sourcegraph wouldn't they need to force all their devs to use the Sourcegraph editor? What if half of the team used Jetbrains and the other half VS Code?

We were worried about this initially, too. It turns out that the features are valuable enough that developers are willing to use Sourcegraph as a separate search and review tool even if they don't use it as their main editor. So you can use IntelliJ for day-to-day editing and Sourcegraph for code review and search.

Perhaps we should make that explicit: "Whether you use it as your primary editor or just for searching and reviewing code, ..."

Thanks for the reply. The form factor for code-review and commenting were standout features for me and i'll definitely check out the process.

Also, you can set up Sourcegraph Server (https://about.sourcegraph.com/products/server) and then everyone gets the core features on all your company's code in their web browser.

They are using the Monaco editor component of VSCode, not forking it

(Sourcegraph dev here) Just to be clear, the Sourcegraph Editor is built on top of Visual Studio Code, not just Monaco. Although we did use just Monaco on the website (not editor) in the past. :)

I love VS Code, but I have a hard time understanding what this does, is this an additional way to manage my repositories or my commits? Or does it cross-reference and access my dependencies?

Sourcegraph CEO here. Sourcegraph Editor is an editor built on VS Code that adds 3 main features that make it useful for searching and reviewing code as well as editing code. Two of them are what you mentioned: (1) it connects to your code host so you can more easily search for and open repositories (it automatically clones them if needed), (2) it can do find-references, etc., across many other repositories, not just your current or local repositories. And (3) is built-in code review and comment capabilities.

Check https://about.sourcegraph.com/products/editor for more information, or just post back here.

That looks like a pretty underwhelming "coming soon" announcement to me.

I personally really like the ideas behind Sourcegraph, but as someone who had the extension installed for a long time, until I removed it recently when it got more in the way than it was helpful for the 100th time, all I've seen so far from Sourcegraph has been pretty disappointing.

Sourcegraph CEO here. Sorry to hear that. Re: the announcement, we will have more to show as the private beta and public beta of Sourcegraph Editor progress. I hope we can impress you then.

As for the Chrome extension getting in your way, I followed up over email to learn more. I want to make sure we fix it ASAP so you find it valuable. Thanks!

Awesome work!

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