
Ask HN: Is there a whole universe of Chinese software that we don't see? - thinkloop
China is obviously a major world player, but we rarely see articles&#x2F;repos&#x2F;posts&#x2F;etc., that seem to originate from there, translated or not, or simply referred to. Are we missing out on lots of cool advancements from China? Or do Chinese engineers generally publish in English? Is there some massive Chinese GitHub with cool stuff we don&#x27;t know about? Science is science and I can&#x27;t shake the feeling that we&#x27;re missing out on stuff, but I really have no idea. Would love to hear people&#x27;s thoughts.
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flohofwoe
I mostly know about software relevant for game development, and there are
indeed some very interesting products (most of them open source) coming out of
China which are mostly unknown in the West. Some examples from my list:

\- FairyGUI (UI framework for games):
[https://en.fairygui.com/index.html](https://en.fairygui.com/index.html),
github: [https://github.com/fairygui](https://github.com/fairygui)

\- LayaAir (HTML5 game engine):
[https://github.com/layabox/LayaAir](https://github.com/layabox/LayaAir)

\- Egret (HTML5 game engine): [https://github.com/egret-labs/egret-
core](https://github.com/egret-labs/egret-core)

\- Cocos2D-X (2D game engine, this might be the only one that's also really
popular outside China): [https://www.cocos.com/en/](https://www.cocos.com/en/)

\- everything by Cloudwu (but especially pbc, protocol buffers in C):
[https://github.com/cloudwu](https://github.com/cloudwu)

~~~
jason_slack
> \- Cocos2D-X (2D game engine, this might be the only one > that's also
> really popular outside China): >
> [https://www.cocos.com/en/](https://www.cocos.com/en/)

Yes, we are fairly lightweight and popular outside of China.

We offer Cocos2d-x, a c++/lua based game engine. There isn't a built in GUI
editor, but FairyGUI works well.

Also, Cocos Creator, a JavaScript/TypeScript based game development
environment. Creator is a complete development tool, GUI tool, etc.

------
hanxue
I work for a multinational tech firm, at their Beijing office. There is no
equivalent of massive Chinese Github. Github is used heavily by Chinese
developers. There are projects incubated in Chinese tech startups and
eventually open sourced, for example the Beego Go web framework.

Due to the Great Firewall of China, there is almost a Chinese-only tech
ecosystem of Android apps, and other "mini-apps" built on top of Wechat. For
example, Jinri Toutiao is a popular app that is almost unheard of outside of
China.

~~~
teknologist
There are Chinese GitHub clones but many companies there use enterprise
solutions for version control: there's one by Alibaba I think and I've seen a
few deployments of GitHub Enterprise and Atlassian/Microsoft solutions.

Work on open source isn't very popular in China in general due to culture
differences.

~~~
nine_k
Could you outline the cultural differences that make open-source work
unpopular with Chinese?

~~~
harpratap
It has more to do with economic conditions I believe. Here in India it's the
same, most people get into software engineering because of easy availability
of jobs and don't really care about Computer Science itself. So the concept of
Open source feels alien to most engineers here, especially "working for free"
when you have to struggle so much just to get a very basic salary.

~~~
baja_blast
Also who has time for side projects when you work in the 996 work culture.

~~~
harpratap
I don't think this can be generalized for China. Plenty of companies in India,
Japan and US have the same shitty culture too. Tesla, Space X, Apple are
infamous for such workaholic cultures.

------
forkLding
In Reactjs, the Ant Design library is built and maintained by a Chinese
company called Ant Financial: [https://ant.design/](https://ant.design/) I
believe they're the second most popular React UI library on Github by stars

I believe the Chinese web world is pretty big on using Vue.js, Golang and
React from what the top Chinese tech companies talk about in their blogs

Also I can read Simplified Chinese and the most popular Github repos in
Chinese seem to be individual blogs, tech interview help and like
frontend/backend guides. Github seems to be almost used as a content-based
social network by Chinese users based around blogs and tech help

See: [https://qz.com/1280215/four-of-the-top-25-github-projects-
ar...](https://qz.com/1280215/four-of-the-top-25-github-projects-are-written-
in-chinese-six-contain-no-code/)

~~~
_bxg1
I think GitHub gets used there as a social network because it isn't fully
censored. I've read about Chinese using it to share/collaborate on
unsanctioned information because it can't just be blocked: unlike Facebook and
Twitter, it's too important to their software industry.

~~~
p410n3
Trivia: This effect is called colleteral freedom

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom)

------
ipiz0618
Chinese researchers are in many state of the art projects along with others.
Maybe that's why they are often overlooked (or they aren't, because they are
doing really well inside/outside China). Even VueJs was created by a Chinese.

If you can understand a bit of Chinese you can search on Baidu, or CSDN,
Zhihu, Jianshu etc (kind of like SO, Quora, Medium in Chinese). In fact,
there's a Chinese clone of almost any major international website that the
majority of people in China use. They also have their own translation of
programming terms , which you'll see in code comments.

------
mtmail
Eye-opening to me was browsing
[https://eu.alibabacloud.com/](https://eu.alibabacloud.com/) We talk a lot
about Google Cloud, AWS, Azure and smaller ones like Digital Ocean, Linode and
such but Alibabacloud I hardly if ever see articles or tutorials about.

~~~
dylz
Huawei Cloud and a few others are also quite massive, but signup is so
insanely difficult (+ "Real Verification" bullshit) that if you're a foreigner
you just wouldn't bother.

~~~
nucleardog
Not that it changes the situation, but in case anyone's not aware that's due
to government regulations[0].

You need the same licenses if you want to sign up for AWS's Chinese regions as
well.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license)

------
Merick
Apache Kylin was actually China’s very first top-level Apache project. It did
come out of eBay, but the work all originated in China. It’s a really cool
solution to query acceleration.

You can learn about it on the community page here:
[http://kylin.apache.org/](http://kylin.apache.org/)

It’s pretty popular across China, and I’ve seen it come up a bunch in
Europe/South America, but in the U.S. it’s pretty new to a lot of folks.

------
redis_mlc
Chinese social and ecommerce companies contribute new features to Mariadb
(MySQL.)

Quora mentions GitCafe and Coding.net in China.

Chinese people write in Chinese mainly, but I imagine programmers can get
around in English. (If you go to an airport in China, often none of the staff
speak English except for perhaps the foreign visitor kiosks, but even then.)

Japanese Open Source in the 1995-2010 era always meant 1-way forking and
localizing it in Japanese, but that might have changed as projects
increasingly added i18n support. (If you're familiar with Japanese writing,
there were obvious reasons for that.)

Most people don't consider programming science, but ok.

------
jon-wood
From the consumer side there's a totally different ecosystem of apps (or A-P-
Ps as everyone calls them) used for almost everything. I travelled to China
last year for work and would have been completely stranded without the person
our supplier assigned to us to look after us.

Cash is basically not used, with everyone using either WeChat or Ali payments
via mobile apps (which as far as we could tell you can't activate without a
Chinese bank account). Even the person hawking souvenirs in the the queue at
the great wall only accepted mobile payments, the only place that would accept
a western card was one particular Xiaomi store.

On the second day we were there we decided to buy a coffee near the office
before going in, only to be thwarted by the fact you could only order via a
mobile app. The person working there literally could not accept an order
manually via the till, and we couldn't install the app to place one because it
was only available on the Chinese version of the app stores. After that we
mostly just accepted the fact we weren't going to be able to function
independently.

~~~
ccvannorman
There's no way this is good for China long term, right? I mean, I am an
entrepreneur, game developer, and English teacher, and I went to China in 2003
and had no issue whatsoever. Based on this info, I have no motivation to go
back and start an English learning school or any other business ....

~~~
josephmosby
It's working okay for one billion people already.

Chinese economic restrictions generally tilt toward keeping the majority of
capital flowing throughout China and strategic investments abroad. They are
definitely not geared to someone who wants to start an English-learning school
and repatriate earnings back to the UK or wherever. WeChat/Alipay support this
- you can't really spend that money anywhere except in China.

~~~
aianus
All the malls in Toronto take WeChat and Alipay.

~~~
blaser-waffle
Vancouver too -- go figure; very common in Richmond, reasonably common
elsewhere.

And I've seen it a few places in Edmonton and Calgary.

------
uberman
I'm sure there is. In fact, I love this charting library:

[https://echarts.apache.org/examples/en/](https://echarts.apache.org/examples/en/)

Now an apache project but comes out of Baidu.

------
ashtonabc
One project I use on a daily basis that isn't well known (and is by a Chinese
developer) is Vimium C
([https://github.com/gdh1995/vimium-c](https://github.com/gdh1995/vimium-c)).
It has similar functionality to Vimium, cVim, Vimperator, Pentadactyl and the
like—browser navigation using vim-like shortcuts. Vimium C is quite
customizable, offers great functionality, and the developer seems quite
responsive to issues. The code is written in TypeScript and I found it easy to
read. Highly recommended.

------
lqs469
Ant-design, ECharts, Vue.js, fastjson, Kylin, dubbo, RocketMQ, Pulsar, Harbor,
SkyWalking... Actually more repos are contributed by the worldwide developer
but not just one country or person (such as vue.js, the founder is Chinese but
runs by the open-source community power, and that's why we call it open-source
software, everyone has the opportunity to contribute and use. That different
from Company behavior).

------
jlengrand
I do think there is. For me, part of the realization was to play around with
the explore feature of Github and sort by most stars / trending in a given
language (in my case Java).

[https://github.com/trending/java?since=monthly](https://github.com/trending/java?since=monthly)

A VERY large portion of the repos are actually written in chinese :).

------
eating555
The fact is that almost every resources are written in Chinese. If you can
read Chinese you can find plenty of, tons of useful and interested stuff. The
reason those are not written in Chinese is that they don't actually need
western people to read and discuss with them. Chinese developers are enough
for discussion, tech talks...

------
jaclaz
Well, that I know of, we have a "better" grub in grub4dos and a "better" grub
(GRUB2) in A1ive's version, thanks to Chinese developers:

[https://github.com/chenall/](https://github.com/chenall/)

[https://github.com/a1ive](https://github.com/a1ive)

------
simonblack
Very probably. We don't normally see it because English-Language websites will
consciously downvote to oblivion anything that isn't in English.

Turn on "showdead" in your HN profile, and you'll generally see at least one
foreign-language article every day in the hidden [dead] posts that's been
bundled out of sight.

~~~
shubb
It's a shame - we have automatic translation so articles in a language most
visitors can't read are still useful to them.

Of course the submitter could fix this themself with some effort but we will
lose good content if we rely on that.

Instead, it would be better if HN translated content and especially titles
into the readers local language or English automatically using public APIs.

~~~
ronsor
> Instead, it would be better if HN translated content and especially titles
> into the readers local language or English automatically using public APIs.

Err... no. Machine translations are awful at least half of the time. It's even
worse for CJK languages.

------
deltron3030
There's CoC - "conquer of completion" among others (sick name btw), a JS based
language server for Vim that gives it VSCode like powers. I've seen a lot of
code editor tooling from China (I like hover over GH user thumbnails of
interesting tools).

------
signaru
I actually liked WPS Office which does not seem to be based on Open/Libre
office and looks more compatible with MS Office.

But in the recent years, I just purchase MS Office licenses, so I am no longer
aware with the current state of MS Office alternatives.

------
scarmig
There's a giant ecosystem of Chinese tech on the consumer side, which is
radically different from what we experience in the West. There's also Alibaba
Cloud, which by some measures is bigger than GCP but is just a clone of AWS.

------
im_dario
In the Go community, there is a significant portion of libraries and
development from China. When visiting the Github's Trending page for Go,
sometimes I need to filter by written language because everything is in
Chinese.

------
bzb3
There's a lot of Chinese software and libraries in the Go ecosystem.

------
logicslave
Honestly, I dont think so. I think they mostly use our code. If you look on
github, there are a bunch of chinnese repos. But there arent state of the art
implementations of things like distributed queues that are better than what we
have

~~~
tcbasche
> If you look on github, there are a bunch of chinnese repos. But there arent
> state of the art implementations of things

Wow, I'm impressed! Such a unique skill! I've never heard anyone do this! Be
able to judge the implementation of an entire group of Github repo's grouped
by language! Can you do Japanese repo's next?

~~~
logicslave
I work in machine learning research and keep up with all of the top papers. I
have exited on an ml startup that I founded. Very few coming out of china are
top papers. Anyone can publish to arxiv. Measuring whether a model is state of
the art is incredibly complex, overfitting to specific datasets is rampant.

Its also ridiculous that I am being downvoted.

