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Comment by dvirsky | Hacker News Reader

Are there any open source powerful code search engines out there? As a Googler the internal code search we have here is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen, it's so fast and powerful I'm amazed by it daily. Is there anything near that quality out there?

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We built Sourcegraph taking inspiration from Google Code Search (https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/ex-googler-guide-dev-tool...) to bring the power of code search—and precise code intelligence that just works—to every dev. Try it out here: https://sourcegraph.com. A super common thing we see is people leaving Google, missing code search, and then bringing Sourcegraph into their new org. We'd love to hear your feedback!

Sourcegraph is open-core, with a dual licensing approach. You can run the open-source version here: https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph#sourcegraph-oss, and we have an enterprise offering for companies that want to adopt for their teams. Similar to GitLab, both our enterprise and OSS code is publicly available.

The best thing about the Sourcegraph instance hosted on sourcegraph.com is that you can edit the URL in your browser from https://github.com/foo/bar to https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/foo/bar to be dropped down into a Sourcegraph search for that GH repo. I've been using it for a long time because of this convenience.

(Though it would be even better if the two options for case-sensitivity and regex search were enabled by default instead of needing me to toggle them on every time.)

You should be able to do that over in your User Settings (Click your picture in the top right and then Settings.) Adding these two things should change that default for you:

   "search.defaultCaseSensitive": true,
   "search.defaultPatternType": "regexp",

Also see: https://docs.sourcegraph.com/admin/config/settings#search-de...

I don't have a user account (nor do I want to make one).

Are you worried this new Github Code Search might steal all your users?

I helped write DXR for indexing Mozilla's source code based on an instrumented compiler run; this has eventually been developed into mozsearch (https://github.com/mozsearch/mozsearch), whose indexing for mozilla-central is visible here: https://searchfox.org.

I thought it was abandoned! This is great to hear it just moved. Is there anyone at Mozilla that can update the old DXR repo [0] to direct people to MozSearch?

[0]: https://github.com/mozilla/dxr

I work on a very large c++ monolith at work and DXR has been a real game changer for helping me just figure out how so much of the codebase works. Thanks!!

Hoogle is pretty neat — you can search by type signature and it’ll find matching APIs from hackage packages: https://hoogle.haskell.org/

Source: https://github.com/ndmitchell/hoogle

My job uses https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/ and I'm generally happy with it. It has some problems with special character searches at times but generally does what I want. It's certainly better than code search in our on-prem github instance.

Yeah, opengrok is great. It is very fast and usually returns good results.

https://grep.app/ is a great alternative to github's current search engine.

For the grepping aspect, https://github.com/google/zoekt is a powerful one-stop-shop. For the navigating, I don't know. SourceGraph maybe, but the linking is somewhat heuristic I assume, not compilation-graph powered. But maybe that changes or depends per language.

We're using https://searchcodeserver.com/ internally and it works quite good, it was miles ahead GH search. After today, I'll have to test GH again to reassert this statement.

If you don’t mind me asking, any insight into why it hasn’t been open sourced?

There is some older version that's open source, I haven't tried it and I don't know how much of today's code search is based on it.

https://github.com/google/codesearch

Not a Googler, so I can't say. There was Mozilla DXR but it has been abandoned.

DXR has largely been replaced with mozsearch (https://github.com/mozsearch/mozsearch), and a quick glance through the really early history does show that it adopted a fair amount of stuff from DXR. The downside is that it's not as easy to set up a local mozsearch instance as old-school DXR was.

Would you by any chance be allowed to record a demo screencast?

You can try it yourself, e.g., the instance the Android team uses: https://cs.android.com/

Oh, I didn't know this existed. The syntax seems to be on par with the internal one, I couldn't find any info on what's driving it.

Also don't know how search works there, but the cross-reference functionality is powered by an open-source Kythe project: https://kythe.io/

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