Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

news.ycombinator.com

91–100 of 230 posts

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#91
post #49

- A build system / package manager like Nix [1] but with a better user experience / more straightforward command-line tooling. - A dependently typed programming language like Coq [2] (or Agda, Idris, Lean, etc.) that is sufficiently approachable to gain enough mindshare that companies start adopting it for mission-critical work. - A version control system which scales to petabytes or more. Something that I could put…

> - A build system / package manager like Nix [1] but with a better user experience / more straightforward command-line tooling. Working on it :) > - A version control system which scales to petabytes or more. Something that I could put large video files in without thinking twice about it. Something a large company could use for their monorepo—or even their data warehouse. https://github.com/facebookexperimental/eden…

Did you write nixery?

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#92

I want a tool that lets me annotate a codebase but with the notes stored locally and not in the code. This would mostly be for corporate code bases so I can take notes/ leave more explicit warnings for others. Less "Turns markdown into react components" and more "If you have to touch this, you need to go to file x, add it there" I understand this is imperfect but so is the codebase I work on.

I've always wanted something similar to git blame for this. Where I can add notes to sets of lines and toggle whether I want the IDE to display them. Sort of like writing on those overhead projector sheets and saving it to a nearby .notes file or whatever. It'd probably be hell to maintain but a dev can dream.

Tangential, but it sucks that it's hard to even find discussion on something like this. Closest I've found is the fictional "an editor" talk here https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#93

I want a tool that lets me annotate a codebase but with the notes stored locally and not in the code. This would mostly be for corporate code bases so I can take notes/ leave more explicit warnings for others. Less "Turns markdown into react components" and more "If you have to touch this, you need to go to file x, add it there" I understand this is imperfect but so is the codebase I work on.

Aren't there tools that suggest, based on commit history "you edited x, and people who do edit y and z"?

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#94
post #89

I want a tool that lets me annotate a codebase but with the notes stored locally and not in the code. This would mostly be for corporate code bases so I can take notes/ leave more explicit warnings for others. Less "Turns markdown into react components" and more "If you have to touch this, you need to go to file x, add it there" I understand this is imperfect but so is the codebase I work on.

There's an Emacs mode that does this called annotate. But why would this be better than just leaving a comment on the file? https://github.com/bastibe/annotate.el

Maybe if you’re working on partially open source code you want a layer of comments separate to the code that aren’t version controlled so you can mention internal bits to each other?

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#95
A truly "next generation debugger" as replacement for gdb, lldb and the MSVC debugger which allows me to watch my program working in realtime (and pause/step/rewind at any time). Visualization should include things like a memory-read/write/execute heatmaps, a realtime flame-graph profiler, a data structure browser which "knows" the entire program state, and a much tighter integration of such a debugger into the regular edit-compile-test workflow.

As it is now, debugging is still stuck in the 20th century (I realize that the "realtime part" is hard to do, and may require to get the compiler and even hardware peeps on board too).

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#96

A truly "next generation debugger" as replacement for gdb, lldb and the MSVC debugger which allows me to watch my program working in realtime (and pause/step/rewind at any time). Visualization should include things like a memory-read/write/execute heatmaps, a realtime flame-graph profiler, a data structure browser which "knows" the entire program state, and a much tighter integration of such a debugger into the regul…

Building something like this to work with existing code in compiled languages is REALLY HARD. However, take a look at rr and Pernos.co.

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#97

I want a tool that lets me annotate a codebase but with the notes stored locally and not in the code. This would mostly be for corporate code bases so I can take notes/ leave more explicit warnings for others. Less "Turns markdown into react components" and more "If you have to touch this, you need to go to file x, add it there" I understand this is imperfect but so is the codebase I work on.

Aren't there tools that suggest, based on commit history "you edited x, and people who do edit y and z"?

Jetbrains IDEs have this feature, however I can't find any other documentation other than this StackOverflow question on how to disable the feature:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59105219/how-to-get-rid-...

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#98
post #89

I want a tool that lets me annotate a codebase but with the notes stored locally and not in the code. This would mostly be for corporate code bases so I can take notes/ leave more explicit warnings for others. Less "Turns markdown into react components" and more "If you have to touch this, you need to go to file x, add it there" I understand this is imperfect but so is the codebase I work on.

There's an Emacs mode that does this called annotate. But why would this be better than just leaving a comment on the file? https://github.com/bastibe/annotate.el

Personally I don't want to have to open the browser to get more detailed docs. I'd rather have it next to the code it's referencing. (Especially if it's just a side project where sphinx or whatever is overkill.)

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#100

CLI / TUI parsers and analyzers of code. Let's not compartmentalize those into super-complex graphical IDEs. I'd like to be able to do e.g. `$TOOL functions path/to/module.rs` and get a flat list with only names or full function signatures (configurable by CLI switches). I'd also like to have some pre-baked analyzers e.g. find all controllers in Rails / Phoenix / Laravel / ActixWeb projects. Or all views, templates,…

I could see 1 and 3 not being too hard to build using treesitter[0] Too bad, I don't have time to build it

[0] https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter

Post reply on HN