srclib

Note: srclib is alpha. Post an issue if you have any questions or difficulties running and hacking on it.

srclib is a source code analysis library. It provides standardized tools, interfaces and data formats for generating, representing and querying information about source code in software projects.

Why? Right now, most people write code in editors that don't give them as much programming assistance as is possible. That's because creating an editor plugin and language analyzer for your favorite language and editor combo is a lot of work. And when you're done, your plugin only supports a single language and editor, and maybe only half the features you wanted (such as doc lookups and "find usages"). Because there are no standard cross-language and cross-editor APIs and formats, it is difficult to reuse your plugin for other languages or editors.

We call this the M-by-N problem: given M editors and N languages, we need to write (on the order of) M×N plugins to get good tooling in every case. That number gets large quickly, and it's why we suffer from poor developer tools.

srclib solves this problem in 2 ways by:

• Publishing standard formats and APIs for source analyzers and editor plugins to use. This means that improvements in a srclib language analyzer benefit users in any editor, and improvements in a srclib editor plugin benefit everyone who uses that editor on any language.

• Providing high-quality language analyzers that implement this standard. These power Sourcegraph.com.

Step 1 is to build the language analyzers. Next up, we will build the editor plugins!

See srclib.org for more information.

Currently, srclib supports:

• Languages: Go, JavaScript, and Ruby (coming very soon: Python, Java, and Bash)

• Features: jump-to-definition, find usages, type inference, documentation generation, and dependency resolution

Want to extend srclib to support more languages, features, or editors? We'll help! Post an issue to let us know what you're building to get started.

Usage

See Getting started for installation instructions.

Misc.

• bash completion for srclib: run source contrib/completion/srclib-completion.bash or copy that file to /etc/bash_completion.d/srclib (path may be different on your system)

Development

srclib binary release process

Contributors with deploy privileges can update the official binaries via these instructions:

1. go get -u github.com/laher/goxc
2. Ensure you have the AWS credentials set so that the AWS CLI (aws) can write to the srclib-release S3 bucket.
3. Run make release V=1.2.3, where 1.2.3 is the version you want to release (which can be arbitrarily chosen but should be the next sequential git release tag for official releases).

License

srclib is licensed under the MIT License. More information in the LICENSE file.

Contributing

If you want to start hacking on srclib or write your own srclib toolchain, join the srclib Slack and then access it on srclib.slack.com. Don't forget to introduce yourself on the #General channel. We are more than happy to meet new contributors and to help people to get started.