LWN: Comments on "Sourcegraph: A free code search tool for open source developers (Opensource.com)"

Sourcegraph: A free code search tool for open source developers (Opensource.com)

Ed_L. — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 23:15:29 +0000

"Forgetting about Perl..." Hey - maybe this will become a trend!

Sourcegraph: A free code search tool for open source developers (Opensource.com)

scientes — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 22:44:26 +0000

> Nothing: it's the "default", and searching for things in that is like searching for a specific cup of water in the ocean.

Totally. Debian code search is great, http://codesearch.debian.net/ but it still doesn't understand include paths the way netbeans does. The problem with netbeans is that it eats your ram and cpu and forces you to use a "project" layout, so I don't use it, but we really need better C scope tools.

Sourcegraph: A free code search tool for open source developers (Opensource.com)

rschroev — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 20:54:02 +0000

> Also no Perl.

I *knew* there was an important language I was forgetting about. Perl, yes, of course. My apologies to the Perl community :)

Sourcegraph: A free code search tool for open source developers (Opensource.com)

nix — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 20:42:20 +0000

Also no Perl. I know Perl is a horror to parse and isn't cool any more, but, sheesh, it's far more widely used than *Haskell*. I don't know what their choice of languages to index is determined by, but it clearly isn't volume of available code (or, to be frank, utility).

Sourcegraph: A free code search tool for open source developers (Opensource.com)

rschroev — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 20:38:28 +0000

> "C is not supported." I guess that explains the empty strchr result.

From https://sourcegraph.com/

"Supports 6 languages: Java, Go, Python, JavaScript (beta), Ruby (beta), Haskell (beta) … and others srclib supports." (But AFAICS srclib currently doesn't support any other).

No C++ I can maybe understand, but no C? Seems a bit ... limited.

Sourcegraph: A free code search tool for open source developers (Opensource.com)

nix — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 20:37:28 +0000

Only languages supported by srclib, which appears not to include C, C++, or any of the other stuff used by the languages in which other languages are written, or the languages in which most stuff other than web frameworks and administrative tools are written to be honest.

I know that *lots* of stuff is written in Python and Ruby, but compare the *volume* of the stuff written in Javascript and Go to the magnitude of the stuff written in much older languages and it's clear that this tool is indexing only a small fraction of "the source code available on the web", not by any means "all". And, tbh, the stuff which really *needs* search tools is written in the older languages, because they've had time to accrete lunatic complexity and also often have very poor "language-wide" search tools: where e.g. Python has pypi, what does C have? Nothing: it's the "default", and searching for things in that is like searching for a specific cup of water in the ocean. So the things for which a search tool like this is particularly needed are specifically those things which this tool does not support. Wonderful.

I was excited for a second -- a new Google Code Search! But it was not to be.

Sourcegraph: A free code search tool for open source developers (Opensource.com)

dskoll — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 20:10:29 +0000

Well, take a look at https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/Distrotech/rp-pppoe

"C is not supported." I guess that explains the empty strchr result.

Sourcegraph: A free code search tool for open source developers (Opensource.com)

scientes — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 19:21:10 +0000

https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=strchr

nothing.....