from Hacker News

Srclib: A polyglot code analysis library

by anant on 8/14/14, 9:41 PM with 32 comments

• by sqs on 8/14/14, 10:09 PM

  Thanks for posting this! I'm one of the original creators. It's still alpha, so there will be bugs. But it can do some pretty cool and useful stuff already in your editor (and it powers https://sourcegraph.com/).

  Anyone have feedback about how we're explaining the problem and solution, and the first-run experience of using the editor plugins and the "src" tool? We would LOVE to hear it so we can fix/improve it.

• by comex on 8/15/14, 1:08 AM

  Based on reading some of the docs (can't check out the source on this phone), looks like this has great potential; for a long time I've wanted something better than cscope, and not limited to a single language, to use with vim.

  My main concern is that any system based on scanning entire source files offline is unlikely to have the same interactivity as IDEs. That is, if I type a line of C++, I don't want clang to have to churn through the whole file and any header files before the navigation updates...

• by tikhonj on 8/14/14, 11:48 PM

  Wow, this looks like an awesome project. As a pretty fanatic Emacs user who doesn't much like IDEs, I've always wanted a nice editor-agnostic IDE ecosystem that I could just plug into Emacs. I've seen language-specific things, which are great but naturally linked to their language, and Emacs-specific monstrosities like CEDET, but never anything trying to be truly universal.

  Very promising.

  For some reason though, I can't help but mentally parse "Srclib" as "Scribd" :/.

• by josephschmoe on 8/14/14, 11:47 PM

  IIRC IntelliJ does some things like this:

  1. It's a polyglot IDE and open-source.

  2. Specialized tools for exporting to multiple languages/DSLs.

• by jalanb on 8/15/14, 8:24 AM

  A couple of points on the website, https://srclib.org/

  1. Can't find an actual Download link, even in the section called "Try it now". Oh - turns out the download links are under "Docs", which is kinda strange.

  2. Downloaded for Linux. Unzipped, ran, got

      $ ./src --help
      bash: ./src: cannot execute binary file
  

  I wonder if the links are correct, as all three download links on the Docs page (https://srclib.org/gettingstarted/) include the phrase "...?os=darwin&..."

• by padator on 8/15/14, 12:54 AM

  related work: https://github.com/facebook/pfff which focused on languages srclib didn't. Also a polyglot source analysis library.

• by kovrik on 8/15/14, 6:42 AM

  Looks awesome!

  Hope to see Vim plugin soon.