Kythe seems like an awesome project, and kudos to Google for releasing this in the open.<p>For those interested in code analysis and dev tools, another library you might want to check out is srclib (I'm one of the authors). srclib is an open-source polyglot code analysis library designed for editors and code explorers. Its mission, supporting a common language-independent schema to support building better language-aware tools, is closely aligned with Kythe's. There's documentation and a succinct description of the problem we're trying to solve at <a href="https://srclib.org" rel="nofollow">https://srclib.org</a>.<p>srclib currently supports Go, Java, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Haskell, and soon PHP. There's a simple command line API that editor plugins can call, and currently there are srclib plugins for Emacs, Sublime, and Atom. srclib also powers <a href="https://sourcegraph.com" rel="nofollow">https://sourcegraph.com</a>.<p>I'm looking forward to seeing where Kythe goes and hopefully integrating Kythe and srclib. I think this is a huge step forward toward better tools for programmers. Just ask anyone who works/used to work at Google about the quality of their internal dev tools vs. the outside world. Thanks to the Kythe team for sharing this with the world!
This sounds like the Grok project that Steve Yegge described in his post about software conservatives and liberals (<a href="https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSKeg4vQtz" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSKeg4v...</a>). Anybody know if it's the same project?<p>I think an interesting possible application of this tool would be source-to-source compilation between languages. For example, once Objective-C support is added, could Kythe be the basis for something like j2objc?
What does this do? I've browsed through the site for a few minutes, and still have no idea what kind of tools you could build with this that you couldn't build before.<p>Is this for cross-language doc generation? Refactoring tools? Something else?<p>Are there any concrete examples of a tool built on top of this that would otherwise be impossible / very difficult?
A similar effort by Facebook open sourced 4 years ago:
(I'm one of the author) <a href="http://github.com/facebook/pfff/wiki/Main" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/facebook/pfff/wiki/Main</a>
with indexers for PHP, C, Java, Ocaml, and preliminary support for many other languages.
Seems like most code editors these days have reached that microsoft excel point where most of the requested features are already present and it is a matter of usability and better ways to help users learn these inherently complicated tools. I'm constantly surprised at how many really bright people aren't using their debugging and profiling tools effectively.<p>The big features I'd like to see are more around collaboration and remote execution. The ability to share, search, remotely debug a big stack easily would be great. Github has taken some big steps forward on that but I'd love wrap that up into the editor. Use cases like natively connecting to a coworker's editor and see what is failing or review some code.
Screenshots (of UI example) would be nice.<p>Is there search built-in or planned? I see some discussion in the storage format section, but only as a negative statement.
It's not very clear at all what the vision is and how this is supposed to be used. I can make guesses, but some clarity would be great if any of the Google people involved are in this thread.
We changed the url from <a href="http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2015/01/kythe-new-approach-to-making-developer.html" rel="nofollow">http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2015/01/kythe-new-appr...</a> to the canonical project page. It also links to <a href="http://www.kythe.io/docs/kythe-overview.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.kythe.io/docs/kythe-overview.html</a>.
This seems a much clearer overview: <a href="http://www.kythe.io/docs/kythe-overview.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.kythe.io/docs/kythe-overview.html</a>