
Announcing Sourcegraph 2.0 - joeyespo
https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/announcing-sourcegraph-2/
======
EddieRingle
Looks pretty slick! Requested early access to the editor.

I'm still not a fan of Electron apps. I'd rather they at the very least be
offline Chrome apps, so then I'd at least be using the latest Blink/V8 combo.
Not to mention it seems that anything Chromium-based likes to make a ton of
little writes to disk for just about everything (even when I'm just moving my
mouse across the page), so to have multiple apps doing that with their own
respective config/cache directories is annoying.

That said, VS Code is the least bad editor running on top of Electron that
I've used, so I'm glad this one is based on it. :)

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mholt
This looks great. Sourcegraph is slowly and steadily making tangible some
ideas that are hard to explain. Whenever I wear their shirts I get asked what
they do, and I have a one-liner, but it's really hard to comprehend the scale
and scope of what they're really trying to accomplish. Really looking forward
to using the editor!

~~~
codehusker
What is your one-liner? I haven't figured out a great way to succinctly
describe Sourcegraph.

They are an interesting company and I'm positive your endorsement is genuine.
It might be worth mentioning that they sponsor one of your projects just to
avoid the appearance of impropriety.

~~~
mholt
I tell people they're building the global graph of source code.

People without any theoretical background will look confused, but CS people
generally understand the deeper implications of this, I think.

I've been supportive of their mission for years, well before any sponsorship.
My (unofficial) relationship with Sourcegraph isn't about money. We have
shared values, pure and simple.

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sqs
Sourcegraph CEO here. Thanks for posting this. Happy to answer any questions
here. We're really excited to start helping with the code editing and review
workflow as well.

~~~
euyyn
Hi! Big fan of your work here. My question is: What do you think about Kythe,
the open-source version of Google's Grok
([https://github.com/google/kythe](https://github.com/google/kythe))? In the
context of both your overall vision, and of strategies: Do you do things
similarly? Do you see collaboration/integration there as desirable?

~~~
sqs
That's a good question. They've built an amazing system. Google and ex-Google
engineers love the code intelligence/search systems that Google has, and those
are powered by Kythe and related systems inside Google. At a product level,
many ex-Googlers miss those systems in their new companies and fill the gap by
setting up Sourcegraph internally.

Tech-wise, Kythe is optimized for offline analysis, and we use servers that
speak LSP ([https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-
protocol](https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol)), which is
built for online analysis and use while you're editing code. That is what I
see as the main difference. We would love for the approaches to converge, or
for the representation/configuration to be compatible.

~~~
Sophistifunk
I think online analysis is the way to go, for those of us using non-google-
sized codebases. Of the many tools I feel programmers are missing in order to
clean up the mess we're making, Sourcegraph is trending towards several of
them - keep up the good work!

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theSoenke
The Sourcegraph Editor is a fork of vscode? Is it not possible to implement it
with an extension? Happily would install an extension but i'm not sure whether
i would switch the editor

~~~
sqs
Sourcegraph CEO here. The Sourcegraph Editor features (on
[https://about.sourcegraph.com/products/editor](https://about.sourcegraph.com/products/editor),
plus other things on the roadmap that aren't on that page) are currently not
possible to build as an extension.

One of two things will happen, assuming we build a great product (which is
obviously our intent :):

1\. We will prove that these features are valuable, and VS Code and other
editors will eventually add support (or extensibility) for them. Then we could
just ship extensions. Everyone wins. And our customers and business do well
because we have a great server product for companies needing to scale up code
intelligence and code reviews beyond what can run locally—the backend for all
these editors that now support these new code intelligence and review
features.

2\. We'll prove these features are valuable, but other editors don't add them
(or the extensibility to support them). Then we'll continue shipping a first-
class standalone editor with support for these features, and developers who
need these features will use that editor. The world will have one additional
editor. For developers that don't use that editor, we'll build lightweight
extensions for other editors with some of the functionality (and that make it
easy to jump to our app from other editors).

I don't know which will come true, but I do know that either way, we as a
company need to demonstrate that these things are valuable to developers in
their editor. That's what we're focused on now. :)

~~~
ben_jones
What are your thoughts on editor preferences for developers? If a company
wanted to adopt Sourcegraph wouldn't they need to force all their devs to use
the Sourcegraph editor? What if half of the team used Jetbrains and the other
half VS Code?

~~~
sqs
We were worried about this initially, too. It turns out that the features are
valuable enough that developers are willing to use Sourcegraph as a separate
search and review tool even if they don't use it as their main editor. So you
can use IntelliJ for day-to-day editing and Sourcegraph for code review and
search.

Perhaps we should make that explicit: "Whether you use it as your primary
editor or just for searching and reviewing code, ..."

~~~
ben_jones
Thanks for the reply. The form factor for code-review and commenting were
standout features for me and i'll definitely check out the process.

~~~
sqs
Also, you can set up Sourcegraph Server
([https://about.sourcegraph.com/products/server](https://about.sourcegraph.com/products/server))
and then everyone gets the core features on all your company's code in their
web browser.

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elcapitan
I love VS Code, but I have a hard time understanding what this does, is this
an additional way to manage my repositories or my commits? Or does it cross-
reference and access my dependencies?

~~~
sqs
Sourcegraph CEO here. Sourcegraph Editor is an editor built on VS Code that
adds 3 main features that make it useful for searching and reviewing code as
well as editing code. Two of them are what you mentioned: (1) it connects to
your code host so you can more easily search for and open repositories (it
automatically clones them if needed), (2) it can do find-references, etc.,
across many other repositories, not just your current or local repositories.
And (3) is built-in code review and comment capabilities.

Check
[https://about.sourcegraph.com/products/editor](https://about.sourcegraph.com/products/editor)
for more information, or just post back here.

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hobofan
That looks like a pretty underwhelming "coming soon" announcement to me.

I personally really like the ideas behind Sourcegraph, but as someone who had
the extension installed for a long time, until I removed it recently when it
got more in the way than it was helpful for the 100th time, all I've seen so
far from Sourcegraph has been pretty disappointing.

~~~
sqs
Sourcegraph CEO here. Sorry to hear that. Re: the announcement, we will have
more to show as the private beta and public beta of Sourcegraph Editor
progress. I hope we can impress you then.

As for the Chrome extension getting in your way, I followed up over email to
learn more. I want to make sure we fix it ASAP so you find it valuable.
Thanks!

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wholien
Awesome work!

