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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

I can only think of one hosted repo service that provides a working go-to-definition feature and it is not github or sourcegraph. What makes you think this will suddenly become widespread? Github spent years doing this and their new thing is strictly non-semantic. It doesn't have the faintest idea where the name is defined, or if there's even a difference between a function name, a parameter name, or a word in a comment.

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> It doesn't have the faintest idea where the name is defined, or if there's even a difference between a function name, a parameter name, or a word in a comment.

I don't think what you are saying is actually true for stack-graphs[0][1].

[0]: https://github.com/github/stack-graphs

[1]: https://github.blog/2021-12-09-introducing-stack-graphs/

FWIW Sourcegraph has fully precise/semantic go-to-definition, find-references, etc. We use SCIP code indexers (a spiritual successor to LSIF, the Microsoft standard for indexing LSP servers)

Not for C++. To test my recollection I navigated to abseil-cpp/strings/str_split.h, clicked on the declaration of absl::ByString::Find, and clicked "Go to definition". I was presented with every function in Abseil named "Find" regardless of its scope or parameter types. That's not "precise code intelligence"!

In the top right corner of the tooltip it will say either "Search-based" or "Precise" - in this case, you're right, we don't have the abseil-cpp repo indexed so it falls back to search-based as you describe.

We do have a C++ code indexer in beta, https://github.com/sourcegraph/lsif-clang - it is based on clang but C++ indexing is notably harder to do automatically/without-setup due to the varying build systems that need to be understood in order to invoke the compiler.

(I work on C++ indexing at Sourcegraph.)

As my colleague mentioned in a sibling comment, we have an existing indexer lsif-clang which supports C++. I just added a Chromium example to the lsif-clang README right now: (direct link) https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/chromium/chromium@cab0660...

We are also actively working on a new SCIP indexer which should support features like cross-repo references in the future. https://github.com/sourcegraph/scip-clang

Right now, Abseil doesn't have precise code navigation because no one has uploaded an index for it. In an ideal world, we would automatically have precise indexes for all the C++ code on Sourcegraph, but that's a hard problem because of the large variety in build systems, build configurations, and system dependencies that are often specified outside the build system.

The rise and popularity of LSP and projects such as treesitter are a superb foundation for features such as this. Both support a wealth of languages, it is still and will be quite hard to assume the toolchain and settings required for producing accurate information though.

But this could be tied into CI, especially for projects utilizing runners for building the code.

So the barrier to entry now is orders of magnitude less and with github and others pushing for codespaces it could be the final piece to tie everything together.

> But this could be tied into CI, especially for projects utilizing runners for building the code.

One often overlooked drawback of generating this data during CI is that you, the project owner, are now paying for the compute. Of course, maybe you qualify for a free tier. And if not, if you're already running a CI job for testing/linting/etc, the marginal cost of also generating code nav symbols might not be too bad. But one benefit of the stack graphs approach mentioned up-thread (and the code search indexing described in OP) is that all of the analysis and extraction work is done in dedicated server-side jobs that GitHub is footing the bill for.

By necessity I already do it many times a day on my workstation. It would be neat for the cloud to start utilizing the endless compute available on client machines. A back-channel when doing a git push to publish some related artifacts?

I can think of zero. Doing go-to-definition statically is very difficult.

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