One important piece of context that might make all these stories less confusing for non-googlers:
Code references are less important inside Google editors, because we have a code viewer tool inside the web browser.
Most people read, explore, follow references, and share permalinks to the view-only tool. It’s a lot better than viewing code in GitHub. It’s super fast, is connected to language servers and can actually trace referenced, and overall has a million little features optimized for reading code.
We also have a code reviewer tool, and a separate tool to run and view CI runs.
So what’s left for the editor? Syntax highlighting?
I would tend to view code, run tests and CI, and review in separate tools specialized for their specific use case. The code editor was just a place where I would type in my changes.
I’d imagine this workflow feels weird to people who learned in one-stop-shop IntelliJ and GitHub world. But I can’t emphasize how much better these other tools were compared to GitHib. So a code editor that also lets me read, review, and test code didn’t really matter for me when I had a collection of smaller tools specialized for each individual task.
To make this more concrete, the Chromium source code browser has a subset of the functionality of the internal Code Search tool. For example, you can left click on symbols to go to reference and right click to find all references:
https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:ipc...
In fact a lot of Google software projects have a public version of code search: https://cs.opensource.google/
How is this so much faster than browsing my tiny little repo on Github? What is Github doing so wrong??
Wow that is a lot faster and nicer than Github.
This is a good example of large companies wouldn't send someone across the street to pick up $1M off the ground. If Google actually released that and a repo to public, they could take Githubs throne. But a few $B business isn't worthit for them.
It's not that the $2B business isn't interesting, it's competing with GitHub would be a major undertaking and the opportunity cost of doing that is probably more than $2B.
> It’s super fast, is connected to language servers and can actually trace referenced
Nit: not connected to language servers, it's connected to Kythe. LSP doesn't have the same kind of functionality.
Every large tech company of 80s, 90s & 2K (Google, eBay & all) have similar history when it comes to IDE, Source Control, Build Systems etc.,. This is not specific to Google.
This...I noticed a real productivity increase when going from Cider/VSCode to JetBrains/IDEA/IntelliJ for Kotlin code editing. Having a "real" IDE was still a plus, if just for the better code completion.
AI has mostly changed the way I write code, I guess, so I rarely use JetBrains anymore, but a few years ago it was clearly a win to use a real IDE at least for Kotlin programming.
JetBrains has several niches it excels in. DataGrip is by far the most important tool in my toolbox, as it allows me to work with every database type imaginable in one place (Databricks, Postgres, MSSQL, Oracle, etc.).
What tools available to the public would you say is similar to this workflow?
Sourcegraph is the closest external thing I've found to Google's internal web tool for viewing code.
The startup I'm at (ersc.io) is working in this space (version control more than the IDE side of things), because, in my opinion, there just plain isn't any.
https://github.com/jhuangtw/xg2xg has a broader list
The only thing remotely close is a monorepo checkout ... with all the problems that come with that.
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