Ask HN: Is there a whole universe of Chinese software that we don't see? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a whole universe of Chinese software that we don't see?

127 pointsthinkloop71 comments

China is obviously a major world player, but we rarely see articles/repos/posts/etc., that seem to originate from there, translated or not, or simply referred to. Are we missing out on lots of cool advancements from China? Or do Chinese engineers generally publish in English? Is there some massive Chinese GitHub with cool stuff we don't know about? Science is science and I can't shake the feeling that we're missing out on stuff, but I really have no idea. Would love to hear people's thoughts.

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I mostly know about software relevant for game development, and there are indeed some very interesting products (most of them open source) coming out of China which are mostly unknown in the West. Some examples from my list:

- FairyGUI (UI framework for games): https://en.fairygui.com/index.html, github: https://github.com/fairygui

- LayaAir (HTML5 game engine): https://github.com/layabox/LayaAir

- Egret (HTML5 game engine): https://github.com/egret-labs/egret-core

- Cocos2D-X (2D game engine, this might be the only one that's also really popular outside China): https://www.cocos.com/en/

- everything by Cloudwu (but especially pbc, protocol buffers in C): https://github.com/cloudwu

> - Cocos2D-X (2D game engine, this might be the only one > that's also really popular outside China): > https://www.cocos.com/en/

Yes, we are fairly lightweight and popular outside of China.

We offer Cocos2d-x, a c++/lua based game engine. There isn't a built in GUI editor, but FairyGUI works well.

Also, Cocos Creator, a JavaScript/TypeScript based game development environment. Creator is a complete development tool, GUI tool, etc.

I work for a multinational tech firm, at their Beijing office. There is no equivalent of massive Chinese Github. Github is used heavily by Chinese developers. There are projects incubated in Chinese tech startups and eventually open sourced, for example the Beego Go web framework.

Due to the Great Firewall of China, there is almost a Chinese-only tech ecosystem of Android apps, and other "mini-apps" built on top of Wechat. For example, Jinri Toutiao is a popular app that is almost unheard of outside of China.

There are Chinese GitHub clones but many companies there use enterprise solutions for version control: there's one by Alibaba I think and I've seen a few deployments of GitHub Enterprise and Atlassian/Microsoft solutions.

Work on open source isn't very popular in China in general due to culture differences.

What a paradox!

Communist China doesn't want to share or work on Open Source, eh?

Probably because they understand the value of labor.

Could you outline the cultural differences that make open-source work unpopular with Chinese?

It has more to do with economic conditions I believe. Here in India it's the same, most people get into software engineering because of easy availability of jobs and don't really care about Computer Science itself. So the concept of Open source feels alien to most engineers here, especially "working for free" when you have to struggle so much just to get a very basic salary.

Also who has time for side projects when you work in the 996 work culture.

I don't think this can be generalized for China. Plenty of companies in India, Japan and US have the same shitty culture too. Tesla, Space X, Apple are infamous for such workaholic cultures.

Products get cloned almost immediately once released in the Chinese domestic market, especially when there's a potential for them to make money. It's about keeping the IP as closely guarded as possible while attracting users.

Companies are very conscious of copying and they see open source as only facilitating that - the cons outweigh the pros. Tech savvy consumers don't appreciate that a company has open sourced some of its work because there's no culture of open source, and the act of open sourcing only allows competitors to rip something off easier. Why would they?

If there's no expectation of anyone contributing back, it makes sense.

OTOH I wonder how Vue.js, Cocos2D, echarts, etc even survive in this circumstances — these seem to have some contributors beside the original authors.

My perspective on what might contribute to this (perceived?) lack of open source contribution coming from China may partially be our (the US') fault. Everyone knows that open source has mostly shifted to being commercialized on the whole and therefore most of the development is done from 9-5. There is literally no intersection of normal business hours between the US and China, so synchronous communication is severely impeded. Obviously, many open source projects are excellent at working completely asynchronously. However, many are not and I think the commercialization trend of recent years has made it even more so a rarity. I've personally seen an uptake in video chat meetings that are sometimes not even recorded, so it's difficult for non-attendees to follow the project. One of the fantastic things I saw in the OpenStack community was a very intentional effort to schedule alternating meeting times to maximize time zone coverage of waking hours. (It was also in text, which made it easily archivable, searchable, and available to people with minimal bandwidth.)

I realize of course that open source development occurs outside of the US and I may be inflating my country's importance in the whole matter. Would love to hear from some non-US open source devs how their contribution experience with people from China compares.

For those who don't know about the "mini-apps" ecosystems, Connie Chan[1] of A16Z has quite a few articles and talks/presentations about them and their trends.

[1] https://a16z.com/author/connie-chan/

In Reactjs, the Ant Design library is built and maintained by a Chinese company called Ant Financial: https://ant.design/ I believe they're the second most popular React UI library on Github by stars

I believe the Chinese web world is pretty big on using Vue.js, Golang and React from what the top Chinese tech companies talk about in their blogs

Also I can read Simplified Chinese and the most popular Github repos in Chinese seem to be individual blogs, tech interview help and like frontend/backend guides. Github seems to be almost used as a content-based social network by Chinese users based around blogs and tech help

See: https://qz.com/1280215/four-of-the-top-25-github-projects-ar...

I think GitHub gets used there as a social network because it isn't fully censored. I've read about Chinese using it to share/collaborate on unsanctioned information because it can't just be blocked: unlike Facebook and Twitter, it's too important to their software industry.

Trivia: This effect is called colleteral freedom

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom

This is true, but only as far as people can keep their Github accounts anonymous. A couple months ago the government tracked down three people who had been using Github to share censored content and arrested them[1]. A whole bunch of other repos shut down quick smart after that for fear of more arrests. We can only hope some people outside the country made local clones.

[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/27/china-free-covid-19-acti...

I have used Ant Design and I've never used bootstrap. I found Ant well made and well designed. It used to suffer from a lack of English documentation but that has since been fixed. It is quite beautiful.

Ant-design is nice, but I refuse to use it because I do not want to support Ant Financial and its CCP affiliated companies.

Last time I tried out Ant Design (about two years ago) I also tried out BizCharts, alibabas library for plotting charts. However, I noticed that it was making requests to kcart.alipay.com servers whenever it was loaded in some weird obfuscated code. Long story short, there was a microscopically tiny mention of it on the Docs in the Mandarin only section. Thus, whilst not the exact same repo, it was part of the same ecosystem of libraries and I have not touched one of them since. Does anyone know if they've made the 'anonymous telemetry' opt-in now?

Similarly, but more innocuously, there was an incident where they silently pushed code with a Christmas “easter egg” that added snow to buttons.

[0] https://blog.shunliang.io/frontend/2018/12/25/the-ant-design...

>a Chinese company called Ant Financial

Ant Financial is under Alibaba. So yes it is pretty big.

Chinese researchers are in many state of the art projects along with others. Maybe that's why they are often overlooked (or they aren't, because they are doing really well inside/outside China). Even VueJs was created by a Chinese.

If you can understand a bit of Chinese you can search on Baidu, or CSDN, Zhihu, Jianshu etc (kind of like SO, Quora, Medium in Chinese). In fact, there's a Chinese clone of almost any major international website that the majority of people in China use. They also have their own translation of programming terms , which you'll see in code comments.

Eye-opening to me was browsing https://eu.alibabacloud.com/ We talk a lot about Google Cloud, AWS, Azure and smaller ones like Digital Ocean, Linode and such but Alibabacloud I hardly if ever see articles or tutorials about.

Huawei Cloud and a few others are also quite massive, but signup is so insanely difficult (+ "Real Verification" bullshit) that if you're a foreigner you just wouldn't bother.

Not that it changes the situation, but in case anyone's not aware that's due to government regulations[0].

You need the same licenses if you want to sign up for AWS's Chinese regions as well.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license

Signup has some additional friction, but it amounts to taking a photo of your ID and waiting 24 hours. Insanely difficult is overstating it quite a bit.

Picture AWS with the names of the services slightly changed, a lot more spelling mistakes, and a lot more "something went wrong" when you try to use the console, and you've pretty much got the Alibaba Cloud experience ;)

I used Alibaba Cloud once for a project on behalf of a China-based customer. The one thing I appreciated most about it was that the service names just describe what they do.

Tencent also - https://intl.cloud.tencent.com/

Apache Kylin was actually China’s very first top-level Apache project. It did come out of eBay, but the work all originated in China. It’s a really cool solution to query acceleration.

You can learn about it on the community page here: http://kylin.apache.org/

It’s pretty popular across China, and I’ve seen it come up a bunch in Europe/South America, but in the U.S. it’s pretty new to a lot of folks.

Chinese social and ecommerce companies contribute new features to Mariadb (MySQL.)

Quora mentions GitCafe and Coding.net in China.

Chinese people write in Chinese mainly, but I imagine programmers can get around in English. (If you go to an airport in China, often none of the staff speak English except for perhaps the foreign visitor kiosks, but even then.)

Japanese Open Source in the 1995-2010 era always meant 1-way forking and localizing it in Japanese, but that might have changed as projects increasingly added i18n support. (If you're familiar with Japanese writing, there were obvious reasons for that.)

Most people don't consider programming science, but ok.

From the consumer side there's a totally different ecosystem of apps (or A-P-Ps as everyone calls them) used for almost everything. I travelled to China last year for work and would have been completely stranded without the person our supplier assigned to us to look after us.

Cash is basically not used, with everyone using either WeChat or Ali payments via mobile apps (which as far as we could tell you can't activate without a Chinese bank account). Even the person hawking souvenirs in the the queue at the great wall only accepted mobile payments, the only place that would accept a western card was one particular Xiaomi store.

On the second day we were there we decided to buy a coffee near the office before going in, only to be thwarted by the fact you could only order via a mobile app. The person working there literally could not accept an order manually via the till, and we couldn't install the app to place one because it was only available on the Chinese version of the app stores. After that we mostly just accepted the fact we weren't going to be able to function independently.

There's no way this is good for China long term, right? I mean, I am an entrepreneur, game developer, and English teacher, and I went to China in 2003 and had no issue whatsoever. Based on this info, I have no motivation to go back and start an English learning school or any other business ....

It's working okay for one billion people already.

Chinese economic restrictions generally tilt toward keeping the majority of capital flowing throughout China and strategic investments abroad. They are definitely not geared to someone who wants to start an English-learning school and repatriate earnings back to the UK or wherever. WeChat/Alipay support this - you can't really spend that money anywhere except in China.

All the malls in Toronto take WeChat and Alipay.

Vancouver too -- go figure; very common in Richmond, reasonably common elsewhere.

And I've seen it a few places in Edmonton and Calgary.

Unfortunately using those apps overseas only appears to work for Chinese citizens. If you are a foreigner who lives, works and pays taxes in China, you still cannot pay overseas with the apps that work perfectly fine here. Getting money out of the country requires several hours of faffing about at the bank.

I'm sure there is. In fact, I love this charting library:

https://echarts.apache.org/examples/en/

Now an apache project but comes out of Baidu.

One project I use on a daily basis that isn't well known (and is by a Chinese developer) is Vimium C (https://github.com/gdh1995/vimium-c). It has similar functionality to Vimium, cVim, Vimperator, Pentadactyl and the like—browser navigation using vim-like shortcuts. Vimium C is quite customizable, offers great functionality, and the developer seems quite responsive to issues. The code is written in TypeScript and I found it easy to read. Highly recommended.

Ant-design, ECharts, Vue.js, fastjson, Kylin, dubbo, RocketMQ, Pulsar, Harbor, SkyWalking... Actually more repos are contributed by the worldwide developer but not just one country or person (such as vue.js, the founder is Chinese but runs by the open-source community power, and that's why we call it open-source software, everyone has the opportunity to contribute and use. That different from Company behavior).

I do think there is. For me, part of the realization was to play around with the explore feature of Github and sort by most stars / trending in a given language (in my case Java).

https://github.com/trending/java?since=monthly

A VERY large portion of the repos are actually written in chinese :).

The fact is that almost every resources are written in Chinese. If you can read Chinese you can find plenty of, tons of useful and interested stuff. The reason those are not written in Chinese is that they don't actually need western people to read and discuss with them. Chinese developers are enough for discussion, tech talks...

Well, that I know of, we have a "better" grub in grub4dos and a "better" grub (GRUB2) in A1ive's version, thanks to Chinese developers:

https://github.com/chenall/

https://github.com/a1ive

Very probably. We don't normally see it because English-Language websites will consciously downvote to oblivion anything that isn't in English.

Turn on "showdead" in your HN profile, and you'll generally see at least one foreign-language article every day in the hidden [dead] posts that's been bundled out of sight.

It's a shame - we have automatic translation so articles in a language most visitors can't read are still useful to them.

Of course the submitter could fix this themself with some effort but we will lose good content if we rely on that.

Instead, it would be better if HN translated content and especially titles into the readers local language or English automatically using public APIs.

> Instead, it would be better if HN translated content and especially titles into the readers local language or English automatically using public APIs.

Err... no. Machine translations are awful at least half of the time. It's even worse for CJK languages.

There's CoC - "conquer of completion" among others (sick name btw), a JS based language server for Vim that gives it VSCode like powers. I've seen a lot of code editor tooling from China (I like hover over GH user thumbnails of interesting tools).

I actually liked WPS Office which does not seem to be based on Open/Libre office and looks more compatible with MS Office.

But in the recent years, I just purchase MS Office licenses, so I am no longer aware with the current state of MS Office alternatives.

There's a giant ecosystem of Chinese tech on the consumer side, which is radically different from what we experience in the West. There's also Alibaba Cloud, which by some measures is bigger than GCP but is just a clone of AWS.

In the Go community, there is a significant portion of libraries and development from China. When visiting the Github's Trending page for Go, sometimes I need to filter by written language because everything is in Chinese.

There's a lot of Chinese software and libraries in the Go ecosystem.

Honestly, I dont think so. I think they mostly use our code. If you look on github, there are a bunch of chinnese repos. But there arent state of the art implementations of things like distributed queues that are better than what we have

> Honestly, I dont think so.

Your honesty is appreciated. Facts are welcome too.

> I think they mostly use our code.

What's "our code"? The strongly connected set of open source software that happens to be written in English?

Our code means code written by individuals working within the USA or at an American Institution.

I work in machine learning research and keep up with all of the top papers. I have exited on an ml startup that I founded. Very few coming out of china are top papers. Anyone can publish to arxiv. Measuring whether a model is state of the art is incredibly complex, overfitting to specific datasets is rampant.

Its also ridiculous that I am being downvoted.

you know there are plenty of Hacker News readers in countries other than the US right?...

> Our code means code written by individuals working within the USA or at an American Institution.

USA occasionally has a reputation for being insular, but I'm happy to see you bucking the trend and embracing institutes across the continent of America.

I suppose I'm reading too much into why "an American Institute" gets capitalised but "china" or "chinnese" does not?

> overfitting to specific datasets is rampant.

Are your conclusions the result of having overfit to the software/research in your field you've looked at?

I don't know either way, but forgive me if I sense a tiny bit of bias.

> If you look on github, there are a bunch of chinnese repos. But there arent state of the art implementations of things

Wow, I'm impressed! Such a unique skill! I've never heard anyone do this! Be able to judge the implementation of an entire group of Github repo's grouped by language! Can you do Japanese repo's next?

I've spent a significant portion of my life on github...

repos

Most of the state of the art AI papers have Chinese researchers on them. Also, the speech recognition that Mozilla is building is a reimplementation of Chinese research done by Baidu.

Yeah but they arent coming out of China. Those are chinnese researchers based out of the united states.

Here's the optical flow paper considered worldwide state of the art for drone navigation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13045
4x Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
6x Tencent's Youtu Lab, Shenzhen, China
Before that was released, the previous state of the art was: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09117
3x The Chinese University of Hong Kong
1x Tencent AI Lab, Shenzhen, China
In Sintel, a benchmark performed by a German university, both of these also rank higher than the highest-ranked research team including a US citizen. It may not be what people want to hear and/or it maybe an issue of cheating, industry espionage, or global politics, but Chinese research teams ARE world-class at computer vision and have been for at least a year now.

The papers that are cited are said to be state of the art by an unrelated German university.
But I'll give you that overfitting is an issue, especially on Sintel.
Still, I did work with selflow myself and it is one of the best. The only issue is with thin objects, but skydio (us startup) is having exactly the same problem.

Is it really that hard to spell "Chinese" correctly? You've done it twice now.

Please don't turn this website into reddit.

Quite an extrapolation from:
1. No infrastructure related code with a Chinese language .md file on an American open source site that passes the filters that (a) you have seen it, and (b) that is better in your opinion than what "we" (US?) has
to
2. There isn't a universe of software from China we don't see"

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