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Comment by necubi | Hacker News Reader

Here's a challenge for somebody: create a code review/pull request tool that helps you really understand the code changes. Some IDEs do an ok job of this for static code (IntelliJ for Java, Emacs haskell-mode), but I've never seen a good tool for giving insight into how a diff is changing a program at the structural level.

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Might I suggest looking at https://sourcegraph.com? Currently it's just code search, and doesn't do code review. But it does understand the code at a function/class/module level. And that makes it fundamentally different from a lot of other code reading tools out there that just treat code as text. For code search, that means it can do things like show you how other people actually call a given function. For code review, it would make it possible to reason about changes to functions/classes/packages instead of lines of text. (Disclaimer: I'm one of the creators of Sourcegraph; would love to hear your feedback)

"For code search, that means it can do things like show you how other people actually call a given function."

i just tried it and that is a pretty big claim.

e.g. https://sourcegraph.com/code.google.com/p/go/symbols/go/code...

Am i wrong or isn't this pretty much what Intellij calls "Usage"? At least I don't see the difference, could you please explain it?

general feedback: the website is too slow. it takes me a couple of seconds to load each page, rendering the page pretty much useless.

Thanks for the feedback; we're working on site speed as a top priority. The examples are similar to the usages feature from your IDE, but 1) the examples are drawn from all the open-source code we've indexed online and 2) we support non-statically-typed languages like Python, JS, and Ruby.

Instead of commit messages, commit line-annotations.

I think for most codebases, this is far too granular and would take far too much time to read and write to be of any practical benefit.

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