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I don't think Sourcegraph is in big trouble here. Their whole play is enterprises, who likely have code spread across many different hosts. On top of that, thei

by mxstbr 4y ago

I don't think Sourcegraph is in big trouble here. Their whole play is enterprises, who likely have code spread across many different hosts. On top of that, their code search is still miles ahead of GitHub's.

tooltitude 4y ago
It's very useful for enterprises to have one solution like github. Github isn't the best in every fields, but overall it's the best offer (they have git hosting, continuous integration, bug tracking, discussion forums, hosted dev environment, and now code search). It reminds me of a bundling strategy used in MS Office.
the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
The new code search includes private repos. Miles ahead doesn’t matter if you get the search at GitHub for free. GitHub actions started out pretty terrible but they are now dominating hosted CI. SourceGraph likely has challenging times ahead considering the valuation.
- sqs 4y ago
  Sourcegraph CEO here. “Challenging times” is how it should be all the time. That means competition is forcing both GitHub and us to build better stuff for devs. Devs win. But to be clear, as a company we are doing well and growing nicely inside customers, with a ton of cash in the bank, an awesome team, and a huge opportunity ahead of us. GitHub’s new code search has been out for 14 months now, so this is nothing new. It’s a big market and there’s way more room for differentiation and dev choice in code search/intelligence than in CI. There’s a lot of code intelligence that GitHub won’t support (precise code nav for more languages, comprehensive code ownership, metadata from other dev tools that know things about code outside the GitHub/Microsoft suite, etc.), there’s a need for the ability to fix (with our Batch Changes) not just find, and even in the core search workflow there’s so much room for improvement with AI fine-tuned on your own code, etc. But talk is cheap and only shipping matters. So, watch what we ship, and send any feedback and requests our way!
emidoots 4y ago
I've worked alongside the CEO/CTO of Sourcegraph for the past 8 years, everyone else is at our company offsite so I figured I'd chime in :) nobody asked me to write this (nor did I ask) :) The article is a top-notch technical write-up, the devs on GitHub code search should be proud of what they've achieved so far! Honestly, we're rooting for GitHub to improve their code search, viewing them as a close peer-not a competitor. We also maintain OSS projects like Zoekt, which IIRC GitLab is maybe looking at using for their own. The more devs that 'get' code search, the better off Sourcegraph is frankly! GitHub has a nice intuitive/simple UX, we could learn a thing or two there (though, easier to do with less features.) Still, Sourcegraph search tech is quite a bit more powerful: * Searching over commit messages, diffs, filename, etc. are super nice for tracking down regressions / finding 'that PR I swear my coworker made' * Expressiveness like "find this regexp in repositories, but only if the repo has had a commit in the last month AND has a file named package.json in its root" * Since Steve Yegge joined us, we've started thinking about ranking of search results, a notoriously difficult thing to do well in code search unless you have great factors to rank on (e.g. a semantic understanding of code): https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/new-search-ranking https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/new-search-ranking * We stream results back, so you can get a comprehensive set of results - not just a few pages, from our API. * Works in GitHub Enterprise, not just GitHub.com. Plus on all your code hosts, think BitBucket, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Gerrit, Phabricator, etc. and even non-Git VCS like Perforce. * Respects permissions of all your code hosts (a very difficult problem, as there are no official APIs to query this info from code hosts in general) Having code search is one thing, but using it is another: * Code Insights (we use search as an API to gather statistics about code, track code quality, keywords, etc. both over time and retroactively and let you build dashboards) * Batch changes (find+replace, but over thousands of repositories. Run a Docker container per repo, run your custom linter script etc. and then draft or send PRs to thousands of repos, manage/track campaigns with thousands of PRs like that over time, etc.) * Precise code intel / semantic awareness of code, we use SCIP indexers for this (spiritual successor to Microsoft's LSIF format for indexing LSP servers.) I am super happy GitHub continues to push their code search effort, and genuinely believe it's a great thing for all developers and us over at Sourcegraph. Also excited to see when they do their public rollout of this :) Anyway, that's just my take as someone who works there-other Sourcegraphers will chime in later if anything I said above feels off to them I'm sure :)
imemyself 4y ago
Sourcegraph has become pretty obscenely expensive in the last couple years (with borderline hostile sales folks to boot). I know at least one company who would love to be able to cancel that contract if GH search is "good enough" now.
- sqs 4y ago
  Sourcegraph CEO here. We definitely need a cheaper tier for smaller companies or those who don’t need our entire feature set. I agree! What do you think that should be? Overall, we’re building what our customers need, and our product goes way beyond what GitHub can offer. Sourcegraph indexes all the code and increasingly all the code intelligence (including code nav but also code ownership and other metadata in the future from your other dev tools). We charge based on active usage, so we make money when devs at customers /choose/ to use us over the alternatives. We’re trying to do this the right way, and tons of customers agree. (If anyone reading this disagrees, please let me know!) Re: your comment about our sales team, I’m really sorry to hear that and want to understand more so I can fix the problem. Can you please email me at sqs@sourcegraph.com?

by mxstbr 4y ago

tooltitude 4y ago

It's very useful for enterprises to have one solution like github. Github isn't the best in every fields, but overall it's the best offer (they have git hosting, continuous integration, bug tracking, discussion forums, hosted dev environment, and now code search). It reminds me of a bundling strategy used in MS Office.

the_mitsuhiko 4y ago

The new code search includes private repos. Miles ahead doesn’t matter if you get the search at GitHub for free. GitHub actions started out pretty terrible but they are now dominating hosted CI. SourceGraph likely has challenging times ahead considering the valuation.

sqs 4y ago
Sourcegraph CEO here. “Challenging times” is how it should be all the time. That means competition is forcing both GitHub and us to build better stuff for devs. Devs win. But to be clear, as a company we are doing well and growing nicely inside customers, with a ton of cash in the bank, an awesome team, and a huge opportunity ahead of us. GitHub’s new code search has been out for 14 months now, so this is nothing new. It’s a big market and there’s way more room for differentiation and dev choice in code search/intelligence than in CI. There’s a lot of code intelligence that GitHub won’t support (precise code nav for more languages, comprehensive code ownership, metadata from other dev tools that know things about code outside the GitHub/Microsoft suite, etc.), there’s a need for the ability to fix (with our Batch Changes) not just find, and even in the core search workflow there’s so much room for improvement with AI fine-tuned on your own code, etc. But talk is cheap and only shipping matters. So, watch what we ship, and send any feedback and requests our way!

emidoots 4y ago

I've worked alongside the CEO/CTO of Sourcegraph for the past 8 years, everyone else is at our company offsite so I figured I'd chime in :) nobody asked me to write this (nor did I ask) :) The article is a top-notch technical write-up, the devs on GitHub code search should be proud of what they've achieved so far! Honestly, we're rooting for GitHub to improve their code search, viewing them as a close peer-not a competitor. We also maintain OSS projects like Zoekt, which IIRC GitLab is maybe looking at using for their own. The more devs that 'get' code search, the better off Sourcegraph is frankly! GitHub has a nice intuitive/simple UX, we could learn a thing or two there (though, easier to do with less features.) Still, Sourcegraph search tech is quite a bit more powerful: * Searching over commit messages, diffs, filename, etc. are super nice for tracking down regressions / finding 'that PR I swear my coworker made' * Expressiveness like "find this regexp in repositories, but only if the repo has had a commit in the last month AND has a file named package.json in its root" * Since Steve Yegge joined us, we've started thinking about ranking of search results, a notoriously difficult thing to do well in code search unless you have great factors to rank on (e.g. a semantic understanding of code): https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/new-search-ranking https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/new-search-ranking * We stream results back, so you can get a comprehensive set of results - not just a few pages, from our API. * Works in GitHub Enterprise, not just GitHub.com. Plus on all your code hosts, think BitBucket, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Gerrit, Phabricator, etc. and even non-Git VCS like Perforce. * Respects permissions of all your code hosts (a very difficult problem, as there are no official APIs to query this info from code hosts in general) Having code search is one thing, but using it is another: * Code Insights (we use search as an API to gather statistics about code, track code quality, keywords, etc. both over time and retroactively and let you build dashboards) * Batch changes (find+replace, but over thousands of repositories. Run a Docker container per repo, run your custom linter script etc. and then draft or send PRs to thousands of repos, manage/track campaigns with thousands of PRs like that over time, etc.) * Precise code intel / semantic awareness of code, we use SCIP indexers for this (spiritual successor to Microsoft's LSIF format for indexing LSP servers.) I am super happy GitHub continues to push their code search effort, and genuinely believe it's a great thing for all developers and us over at Sourcegraph. Also excited to see when they do their public rollout of this :) Anyway, that's just my take as someone who works there-other Sourcegraphers will chime in later if anything I said above feels off to them I'm sure :)

imemyself 4y ago

Sourcegraph has become pretty obscenely expensive in the last couple years (with borderline hostile sales folks to boot). I know at least one company who would love to be able to cancel that contract if GH search is "good enough" now.

sqs 4y ago
Sourcegraph CEO here. We definitely need a cheaper tier for smaller companies or those who don’t need our entire feature set. I agree! What do you think that should be? Overall, we’re building what our customers need, and our product goes way beyond what GitHub can offer. Sourcegraph indexes all the code and increasingly all the code intelligence (including code nav but also code ownership and other metadata in the future from your other dev tools). We charge based on active usage, so we make money when devs at customers /choose/ to use us over the alternatives. We’re trying to do this the right way, and tons of customers agree. (If anyone reading this disagrees, please let me know!) Re: your comment about our sales team, I’m really sorry to hear that and want to understand more so I can fix the problem. Can you please email me at sqs@sourcegraph.com?