To prevent any confusion, this is a different product than Mozilla's Glean [0][1]. [0] https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/concepts/glean/glean.html [1] https://github.com/mozilla/glean/
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Glean – System for collecting, deriving and querying facts about source code
61–70 of 85 posts
Re: Glean – System for collecting, deriving and querying facts about source code
#62We use this to power things like find-references or jump-to-def, "symbol search" and autocomplete, or more complicated code queries and analysis (even across languages). Imagine rich LSPs without a local checkout, web-based code queries, or seeding fuzzers and static analyzers with entry points in code. Our focus has been on very large scale, multi-language code indexing, and then low latency (e.g. hundreds of micros…
I'm really struggling to understand what Glean does, and why I would use it. Most important: Your landing page should quickly show what Glean does that a typical IDE (Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, ect, does.) Specifically, things like "Go to definition," and tab completion have been in industry-leading IDEs for at least 20 years. What's novel about Glean? It seems like a lot of hoops to jump through whe…
This makes a lot of sense to me through an efficiency lens.
Facebook could spend a lot of money to get engineers beefy workstations, and then have each of these workstations clone the same repository and build the same index locally.
Or, they could leverage the custom built servers in their data centers (which are already more energy-efficient than the laptops), build a single index of the repo, and serve queries on-demand from IDEs throughout the company.
I could also see an analytics angle to this if it could incorporate history and track engineering trends over time. In my experience, decision making in engineering around codebase maintenance is usually rooted in “experience” or “educating guessing” rather than identifying areas of high churn in the codebase or what not.
Re: Glean – System for collecting, deriving and querying facts about source code
#63We use this to power things like find-references or jump-to-def, "symbol search" and autocomplete, or more complicated code queries and analysis (even across languages). Imagine rich LSPs without a local checkout, web-based code queries, or seeding fuzzers and static analyzers with entry points in code. Our focus has been on very large scale, multi-language code indexing, and then low latency (e.g. hundreds of micros…
Briefly skimmed the docs and it noted that it doesn't store expressions from the parsed AST. That means it's mostly a symbol lookup system?
When doing large system refactoring searching by code patterns is the number one thing I'd like to have a tool for. For example being able to query for all for loops in a codebase that have a call to function X within their body.
Re: Glean – System for collecting, deriving and querying facts about source code
#64We use this to power things like find-references or jump-to-def, "symbol search" and autocomplete, or more complicated code queries and analysis (even across languages). Imagine rich LSPs without a local checkout, web-based code queries, or seeding fuzzers and static analyzers with entry points in code. Our focus has been on very large scale, multi-language code indexing, and then low latency (e.g. hundreds of micros…
I'm really struggling to understand what Glean does, and why I would use it. Most important: Your landing page should quickly show what Glean does that a typical IDE (Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, ect, does.) Specifically, things like "Go to definition," and tab completion have been in industry-leading IDEs for at least 20 years. What's novel about Glean? It seems like a lot of hoops to jump through whe…
100% same take.
I'd add that I didn't want to click "get started" because i didn't know if it was a thing i wanted, and then "get started" actually took me to documentation, which is not what i expect from a "get started" button. The Documentation had the presumption that i wanted to use it, and thus the implication that i knew wtf "it" was.
I don't care about its efficiency, or declarative language, or any of that when i still don't know what we're talking about.
Re: Glean – System for collecting, deriving and querying facts about source code
#65Getting a 401 when trying `docker pull ghcr.io/facebookincubator/glean/demo:latest` -- is that true for anyone else?
Re: Glean – System for collecting, deriving and querying facts about source code
#66We use this to power things like find-references or jump-to-def, "symbol search" and autocomplete, or more complicated code queries and analysis (even across languages). Imagine rich LSPs without a local checkout, web-based code queries, or seeding fuzzers and static analyzers with entry points in code. Our focus has been on very large scale, multi-language code indexing, and then low latency (e.g. hundreds of micros…
I'm really struggling to understand what Glean does, and why I would use it. Most important: Your landing page should quickly show what Glean does that a typical IDE (Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, ect, does.) Specifically, things like "Go to definition," and tab completion have been in industry-leading IDEs for at least 20 years. What's novel about Glean? It seems like a lot of hoops to jump through whe…
“Go to definition” has been around even longer, since at least the early 90s
Re: Glean – System for collecting, deriving and querying facts about source code
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm really struggling to understand what Glean does, and why I would use it. Most important: Your landing page should quickly show what Glean does that a typical IDE (Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, ect, does.) Specifically, things like "Go to definition," and tab completion have been in industry-leading IDEs for at least 20 years. What's novel about Glean? It seems like a lot of hoops to jump through whe…
> It seems like a lot of hoops to jump through when Visual Studio (and Visual Studio Code) can index a very large codebase in a few seconds. I think you are not thinking large enough. An IDE absolutely can not index a very large codebase and allow users to make complex queries on it. Think multiple millions lines of code here. The use case is closer to "find me all the variables of this type or a type derived from it…
There's large, and there's scope. I use VSCode to dabble in dozens of projects across a dozen languages at a time, often coming back to fix things after years. VSCode is great at telling me what I did in the current project, but I can't remember library calls or even syntax without looking at something I wrote before. My efficiency is perhaps 50% at recalling where to look; a tool that kept my entire corpus at my fingertips would be extremely welcome. But I'm failing to see how this is that.
Re: Glean – System for collecting, deriving and querying facts about source code
#68Getting a 401 when trying `docker pull ghcr.io/facebookincubator/glean/demo:latest` -- is that true for anyone else?
Sorry about that, the package was still set to private. Try again now?
Re: Glean – System for collecting, deriving and querying facts about source code
#69To prevent any confusion, this is a different product than Mozilla's Glean [0][1]. [0] https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/concepts/glean/glean.html [1] https://github.com/mozilla/glean/
I was also confused first if (Mozilla) glean gained some out-of-scope features.
Re: Glean – System for collecting, deriving and querying facts about source code
#70We use this to power things like find-references or jump-to-def, "symbol search" and autocomplete, or more complicated code queries and analysis (even across languages). Imagine rich LSPs without a local checkout, web-based code queries, or seeding fuzzers and static analyzers with entry points in code. Our focus has been on very large scale, multi-language code indexing, and then low latency (e.g. hundreds of micros…
I'm really struggling to understand what Glean does, and why I would use it. Most important: Your landing page should quickly show what Glean does that a typical IDE (Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, ect, does.) Specifically, things like "Go to definition," and tab completion have been in industry-leading IDEs for at least 20 years. What's novel about Glean? It seems like a lot of hoops to jump through whe…
I don't know what Glean is used for, but here are some guesses for this kind of technology:
- find references / go to definition for web tools, like when reviewing pull requests
- multi-language refactoring, e.g. modifying C bindings
- building structural static analysis tools like coccinelle, or semgrep, but better