Rf: an experimental refactoring tool for Go
pkg.go.dev
pkg.go.dev
- Replace an import with another import. This is used when forking a go package.
- Rename a package.
It's also pretty unclear from the documentation which operations are "UNIMPLEMENTED", since the label simply falls directly between two different operations. It would be nice if this were made more explicit.
If you are truly forking with no intention to merge back, isn’t the manual find-and-replace by IDE just fine?
When you build module A, it will pull module B and module github.com/C, instead of B and company.internal/C, unless A has its own replace directive for C.
And yes, manually doing the rename "is fine", but I don't think that has any reason to be stated in a discussion about a refactoring tool.
Find and replace is the baseline, and for many refactorings is insufficient and fragile, however in replacing a stable, unique, and isomorphic token it is basically as good as it gets, so I think it is relevant. Its probably the least useful thing a refactoring tool could do.
Getting existing codebases to do new things is hard, and most of enterprise software engineering is basically "rework this API (in the general sense, not web-API sense) for a new product use case".
This tool seems to borrow the philosophy of Go's keeping the language simple, with the tradeoff of a more complex (but fairly well supported) ecosystem to account for missing language features.
IME, Golang (some would say paradoxically due to a lack of generics) is one of the best languages to refactor because of:
- Forced error handling semantics so that unhappy paths are easily enumerated
- Tooling like `rdep` to quickly grok the impact of a package refactor
- String templates/codegen being a first-class "blessed" part of the ecosystem (i.e. you can find tooling by the Go team as a reference when writing your own)
Some would balk at things like codegen being how Go handles this, but for the iteration loops at most companies at scale (where a few tools to do codegen are written & maintained by one team and consumed by others) it works well. For paradigms where you want everyone to contribute to the tooling, it works slightly less well since the barrier of understanding the ecosystem is greater than just understanding the language. Nevertheless, it seems to be the right tradeoff for most enterprise use cases.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been at more than a few companies and this lines up. Managing a refactor or migration that’s long term and creates significant impact across an org chart or product area is definitely in the purview of promotion to senior or staff, whatever it’s called.
I also think that "migration" and refactor are completely different concepts. And only the first is going to get you promoted (in the context of Google), because there's so much tooling for making even large refactoring relatively trivial. Pretty much every language has something like this, the build system also supports it too, so the process of, for example, taking a file, renaming it, querying and updating all dependencies (both source files and the build system), testing and sending out pull requests is essentially entirely automated. Unless there's something unique about a refactoring, it's not challenging enough to be promo-worthy.
Just as a friendly aside, your tone seems strangely defensive (though this may just be my fault reading this tired at 3AM) - Levels tells me you make on the order of half a million a year, while I’ll be lucky to make half of that in the next decade at my employer, so you really can’t feel persecuted by this when you most likely work half as much as me while being rewarded for it while folks like me struggle to tread water and are considered mentally deficient.
Yes, I'd refer to that as a migration, which absolutely is a lot of effort, but a tool like this isn't going to be particularly helpful with a migration precisely because the majority of the effort with such a migration will be like...doing all the data stuff and traffic stuff. Changing the code is a minimal part. A refactor is often not a thing that even registers at a smaller company, because its on the scale of a few files. But "Large Scale Changes" are a thing when you end up having millions of lines of code (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrC6ROeV4GI), and tools like this one are useful for those kinds of changes. But a single LSC won't get you promoted.
And rf is neat, but in a very go way, it's not particularly exciting if you're familiar with https://github.com/google/pasta or https://github.com/bazelbuild/buildtools/blob/master/buildoz... or clangmr or https://github.com/google/Refaster, or outside of google Semgrep and Bowler and others, since its essentially the same, but built in go for go.
> Just as a friendly aside, your tone seems strangely defensive (though this may just be my fault reading this tired at 3AM)
Not at all. I was however, pointing out that "this was really just a way to brag about where they work. Seems oddly common among people that work at that company." was certainly unnecessary, and perhaps unkind.
> perhaps unkind
Unnecessary? I sure don’t see people from my company point it out constantly. The superiority complex seems to be a Google only phenomenon in my experience. I guess that’s caused by constant external validation - perhaps it’s people like you that are “unkind” by flaunting your wealth and status while the rest of us have literally nothing.
The market has determined people like me are worth half of you or less. Please be cognizant of this.
Over the years, one company I've worked for off and on (as a consultant/contractor) went from a jQuery UI library, to a CSS component library (which was fine), to an AngularJS component library, then some ex-googler (younger than me) swept in and became CTO or similar and Decided that the whole company should use, drumroll please, Polymer. Then Polymer 2 came around and they had to scramble to make everything Polymer 2 compatible. They were just about done when Polymer 3 came around, which did things Differently once again.
But I'm sure the guy made decent scratch and left the company right before things came crashing down to an even more cushy job. That's usually what happens.
The whole idea of web components was somehow sold inside Google, hard. They even re-wrote Youtube with web components v0 which was almost immediately deprecated. And Chrome had to support it for years before Youtube rewrote stuff in v1.
Last year they shipped Constructible Stylesheets by default in Chrome despite the fact that both Safari and Mozilla were against the state of the spec and the proposed implementation.
The only reason? lit-html was going to use it. And the justification for not hiding it back behind the flag? "Oh, our internal metrics show 0.8% of sites using them", which, at the time, was exclusively Google-developed lit-html exclusively on Google-developed properties.
Rdep: https://github.com/axw/rdep Gomod: https://github.com/Helcaraxan/gomod
If you look at what they're doing under the hood, its mostly gluing bunch of official Golang libs that let you inspect package-level information.
They could have just added pattern matching and exhaustivity checking though, right?
I'm working on a an AST visualization tool and accidentally stumbled in to this rabbit hole. Send help!
I've used it before locally for some structural code changes. The author is super helpful/responsive too.