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Sourcegraph CEO here. Thanks for posting this. Happy to answer any questions!

by sqs 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pests 8y ago
Looks awesome and I hope to hear from succeed! The blue box half way down is really bad on mobile. Too much margin. edit: https://imgur.com/a/8vCwBjh https://imgur.com/a/8vCwBjh
- sqs 8y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out. Fix deployed, should be online in a few min.
skybrian 8y ago
How much of this plan do you envision will be provided by Sourcegraph and how much comes from the many other people working on similar things? (For example, many people are working on language servers these days.)
- sqs 8y ago
  Hey, Brian! Our (Sourcegraph's) unique role is that we have a product used by a ton of developers to search and browse code (in public and inside their company), so we have an audience for distribution of these tools. We also have some expertise. So, I envision most of our work being on that, and perhaps a few reference implementations of language servers and other APIs, and then letting the true language experts outside of Sourcegraph own the language-specific parts. This is because the best people to build language servers are the language maintainers/experts themselves. A great language server should be a core part of every programming language, just as most languages have packages for parsing their own AST, typechecking, etc. (E.g., the javac API, go/types and related packages, and the TypeScript API.) This is incentive-aligned because great tooling boosts language adoption. Rust has done a great job here, with an official language server (https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rls https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rls). The Go team is investigating building an official language server, which we would love (we built an unofficial one and are happy to deprecate it in favor of an official one, or help make it official--whatever is easiest for the Go team/community). For languages that don't yet have a good language server, we would dearly love to sponsor the creation of one, but it's quite time consuming to do so. It takes a while to find the right person to build it for each language (esp. for languages we aren't familiar with), and the majority of these projects have not yielded a working language server, so that hasn't been as easy as we had hoped. This is the main bottleneck. And in all cases, we want to make it so there's a huge reward to building a great language server. When you build a language server, you can use Sourcegraph to run it for all code you view on GitHub, Bitbucket Server, and (soon) other code hosts. That means you get hovers, go-to-definition, find-references, etc., in code files and PRs in your existing tools. (See https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sourcegraph-for-github/dgjhfomjieaadpoljlnidmbgkdffpack?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sourcegraph-for-gi... or the Firefox extension to start using that.) The process for taking a language server and deploying it to Sourcegraph currently requires some intervention from us, but we are changing that with https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph-extension-api https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph-extension-api. This will also make it much easier to take a language server and make it work in all editors, without writing per-editor shim extensions.
dantiberian 8y ago
What is the relationship between Sourcegraph and the LSP? The Master Plan reads like you were part of creating it?
- sqs 8y ago
  Sourcegraph CEO here. Microsoft designed and released LSP. We are eternally grateful for that! We played no part in its creation. The first LSP mention links to the repo at https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol with more info. We have, however, built and/or sponsored many language servers. (Those, in turn, build on compiler APIs that other people tirelessly created, to which we also owe thanks.)
  - Loic 8y ago
    The LSP is a really wonderful, simple and well executed idea. The simplicity of the protocol, cross platform (not bound to a COM interface or similar Windows only technology), ease of creation of an implementation in any language, all well done. This is where the deep experience of Microsoft in building developer tools together with the desire to be cross platform are shining. As a user of Emacs under Linux for the past 20 years to code in Fortran, they succeed in me using Visual Studio Code[0] and hack into a Fortran Language Server! [0]: https://www.ceondo.com/ecte/2018/09/vscode-visual-studio-code-fortran/ https://www.ceondo.com/ecte/2018/09/vscode-visual-studio-cod...
    - sqs 8y ago
      Yes, and LSP is one of those ideas that I respect even more because it was laughed at initially! Unlike most other approaches at solving this problem, it did NOT try to model concepts or structures in programming languages. It is presentational, not semantic; it is solely concerned with "what does the user want to do/see". It was radically simpler than other approaches at solving the same problem, and it has achieved tremendous adoption, so I think it's fair to say it's a success. BTW, very cool that you built the Fortran language server!

Sourcegraph CEO here. Thanks for posting this. Happy to answer any questions!

by sqs 8y ago

Sourcegraph CEO here. Thanks for posting this. Happy to answer any questions!

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pests 8y ago

Looks awesome and I hope to hear from succeed! The blue box half way down is really bad on mobile. Too much margin. edit: https://imgur.com/a/8vCwBjh https://imgur.com/a/8vCwBjh

sqs 8y ago
Thanks for pointing that out. Fix deployed, should be online in a few min.

skybrian 8y ago

How much of this plan do you envision will be provided by Sourcegraph and how much comes from the many other people working on similar things? (For example, many people are working on language servers these days.)

sqs 8y ago
Hey, Brian! Our (Sourcegraph's) unique role is that we have a product used by a ton of developers to search and browse code (in public and inside their company), so we have an audience for distribution of these tools. We also have some expertise. So, I envision most of our work being on that, and perhaps a few reference implementations of language servers and other APIs, and then letting the true language experts outside of Sourcegraph own the language-specific parts. This is because the best people to build language servers are the language maintainers/experts themselves. A great language server should be a core part of every programming language, just as most languages have packages for parsing their own AST, typechecking, etc. (E.g., the javac API, go/types and related packages, and the TypeScript API.) This is incentive-aligned because great tooling boosts language adoption. Rust has done a great job here, with an official language server (https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rls https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rls). The Go team is investigating building an official language server, which we would love (we built an unofficial one and are happy to deprecate it in favor of an official one, or help make it official--whatever is easiest for the Go team/community). For languages that don't yet have a good language server, we would dearly love to sponsor the creation of one, but it's quite time consuming to do so. It takes a while to find the right person to build it for each language (esp. for languages we aren't familiar with), and the majority of these projects have not yielded a working language server, so that hasn't been as easy as we had hoped. This is the main bottleneck. And in all cases, we want to make it so there's a huge reward to building a great language server. When you build a language server, you can use Sourcegraph to run it for all code you view on GitHub, Bitbucket Server, and (soon) other code hosts. That means you get hovers, go-to-definition, find-references, etc., in code files and PRs in your existing tools. (See https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sourcegraph-for-github/dgjhfomjieaadpoljlnidmbgkdffpack?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sourcegraph-for-gi... or the Firefox extension to start using that.) The process for taking a language server and deploying it to Sourcegraph currently requires some intervention from us, but we are changing that with https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph-extension-api https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph-extension-api. This will also make it much easier to take a language server and make it work in all editors, without writing per-editor shim extensions.

dantiberian 8y ago

What is the relationship between Sourcegraph and the LSP? The Master Plan reads like you were part of creating it?

sqs 8y ago
Sourcegraph CEO here. Microsoft designed and released LSP. We are eternally grateful for that! We played no part in its creation. The first LSP mention links to the repo at https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol with more info. We have, however, built and/or sponsored many language servers. (Those, in turn, build on compiler APIs that other people tirelessly created, to which we also owe thanks.)
- Loic 8y ago
  The LSP is a really wonderful, simple and well executed idea. The simplicity of the protocol, cross platform (not bound to a COM interface or similar Windows only technology), ease of creation of an implementation in any language, all well done. This is where the deep experience of Microsoft in building developer tools together with the desire to be cross platform are shining. As a user of Emacs under Linux for the past 20 years to code in Fortran, they succeed in me using Visual Studio Code[0] and hack into a Fortran Language Server! [0]: https://www.ceondo.com/ecte/2018/09/vscode-visual-studio-code-fortran/ https://www.ceondo.com/ecte/2018/09/vscode-visual-studio-cod...
  - sqs 8y ago
    Yes, and LSP is one of those ideas that I respect even more because it was laughed at initially! Unlike most other approaches at solving this problem, it did NOT try to model concepts or structures in programming languages. It is presentational, not semantic; it is solely concerned with "what does the user want to do/see". It was radically simpler than other approaches at solving the same problem, and it has achieved tremendous adoption, so I think it's fair to say it's a success. BTW, very cool that you built the Fortran language server!