When folks ask me a question about our codebase internally I try to a) answer the question b) say "If I were trying to find the answer to that question with our tools, here's my entry point, here's the search query, and here's my mental heuristic for why I'd click on result #3"
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"What's livegrep do?" Instantly grep all code at your company from a web interface, with it producing the relevant files, contextual snippets, and links to the full version in Github/GHE/etc. It's blaaaaaazing fast, too, even across our Very Materially Sized codebase.
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Importantly, because livegrep functions through a web interface, you don't need to have the right repository checked out to very quickly answer questions about it. (It's also ~100X faster than trying to search Github, in my experience, and significantly faster than grep.)
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I once asked
@nelhage how he got a distributed system to be as responsive as livegrep. Answer was nothing is distributed; he just wrote magically efficient code -
https://blog.nelhage.com/2015/02/regular-expression-search-with-suffix-arrays/ … Has some color on the algorithms I used, fwiw. Although honestly I think "keep the whole thing in memory and work in C++" is as much a part of it.
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thanks for the tip!
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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