Re:An ex-Googler’s guide to dev tools
by rockwotj on Thursday November 26, 2020 @03:22AM
(#25218027)
Search on GitHub is very bad IMO.
The recent semantic references stuff they've added is helping, but that only seems to be available in certain language/setups and doesn't work cross repo. Google's xref system allowed you to browse essentially the whole Google codebase - it was amazing. Third party code was indexes too, I remember my team used code search to track down a bug in NGINX once.
Githubs normal search feature is bad. I can't even quote stuff for exact matches. I usually end up using bigquery for GitHub wide searches [1] or just pull down the repo and grep locally.
The recent semantic references stuff they've added is helping, but that only seems to be available in certain language/setups and doesn't work cross repo. Google's xref system allowed you to browse essentially the whole Google codebase - it was amazing. Third party code was indexes too, I remember my team used code search to track down a bug in NGINX once.
Githubs normal search feature is bad. I can't even quote stuff for exact matches. I usually end up using bigquery for GitHub wide searches [1] or just pull down the repo and grep locally.
[1]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/cloudblog.withgoogle.com/produc...