Kythe – A pluggable ecosystem for building tools that work with code

kythe.io

38 points·jhawk28··6 comments

First impressions were, wow ambitious project. Then I saw the modest looking website. All along I'm somewhat skeptical whether the project could live up to the expectations in the title.

Then all of a sudden all my questions were answered... It's a Google project.

This sounds much like one of the things that Steve Yegge (sp?) was describing on one of the "Stack Overflow" podcasts about 6 years ago.

He wanted a common system to track the data about source code, in various languages, that an IDE would need to know.

The internal bits that grew into this (mentioned under "Background") were hands-down the best part about working at Google (at least in terms of actually getting work done).

how does this compare to srclib?

https://srclib.org/

(srclib contributor here) srclib is a bit higher level. Its goal is to be able to look at any source tree and automatically detect languages, packages, build config, etc. We're actually looking at using some of Kythe's lower level analyzers to invoke after srclib auto-detects and auto-configures the build.

srclib also has an API that makes it easy to build editor plugins that are language independent. Check out the editor plugins dropdown at https://srclib.org/overview/ for a list.

Other folks can check out what srclib is able to infer on various projects at https://sourcegraph.com/ (which is powered by srclib).

or to pfff: https://github.com/facebook/pfff

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