Google Kythe is a
source code
In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...
indexer and
cross-reference
The term cross-reference (abbreviation: xref) can refer to either:
* An instance within a document which refers to related information elsewhere in the same document. In both printed and online dictionaries cross-references are important because ...
r for
code comprehension which describes itself as a "pluggable, (mostly) language-agnostic ecosystem for building tools that work with code".
Overview
The core of Google Kythe is in defining language-agnostic protocols and data formats for representing, accessing and querying source code information as data. Kythe relies on an instrumented build system and compilers that produce indexing information, semantic information and metadata in Kythe specified format. This information obtained from running an instrumented build is stored in a language-agnostic
graph
Graph may refer to:
Mathematics
*Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges
**Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties
*Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discre ...
structure. Finally, this graph structure can be queried to answer questions about the code base.
Google Kythe is an
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
project being developed by
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
. It is licensed under an Apache licence 2.0.
Grok
Google Kythe originates from an internal project called Grok.
Grok had been proposed by
Steve Yegge
Steve Yegge is an American computer programmer and blogger who is known for writing about programming languages, productivity and software culture through his "Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants" site, followed by "Stevey's Blog Rants."
Education
Yegge ...
in 2008. Yegge observed that software projects routinely use more than 3 programming languages, yet development tools tend to be language specific and don't handle multiple programming languages well. Adding support for a language to an IDE is hard and the ad hoc analysis tools in IDEs tend to be inferior to real parsers and compilers.
Some parts of Grok were publicly released even before Google Kythe was announced. In 2010, Google released a Python static analyzer which has been developed as part of Grok.
In 2012, C++, Java, Python, JS and "2 internal languages" were supported by Grok. There was a browser client with support for querying the database and visually navigating through the source code. There was an
Emacs
Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...
client.
Chromium
Chromium is a chemical element with the symbol Cr and atomic number 24. It is the first element in group 6. It is a steely-grey, lustrous, hard, and brittle transition metal.
Chromium metal is valued for its high corrosion resistance and hardne ...
Code Search Browser uses Grok index to provide quick links to definition for every symbol in the source code.
Reception
See also
*
Clang
Clang is a compiler front end for the C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++ programming languages, as well as the OpenMP, OpenCL, RenderScript, CUDA, and HIP frameworks. It acts as a drop-in replacement for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), ...
*
Language Server Protocol The Language Server Protocol (LSP) is an open, JSON-RPC-based protocol for use between source code editors or integrated development environments (IDEs) and servers that provide programming language-specific features like code completion, syntax hig ...
*
LXR Cross Referencer
LXR Cross Referencer, usually known as LXR, is a general-purpose source code indexer and cross-referencer for code comprehension that provides web-based browsing of source code, with links to the definition and usage of any identifier.
History ...
*
OpenGrok
OpenGrok is a source code search and cross-reference engine. It helps programmers to search, cross-reference, and navigate source code trees to aid code comprehension.
It can understand various program file formats and version control histories ...
References
External links
Grok
Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus blog
blog
Stanford Seminar - Google's Steve Yegge on GROK lecture
Project Grok - Steve Yegge - Emacs Conference 2013 talk
Steve Yegge on Scalable Programming Language Analysis talk
Kythe
Kythe(Google Kythe Homepage)
Indexing Large, Mixed-Language Codebases talk
Similar projects
Facebook pfffsrclibOracle Frappé
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Microsoft Language Server Protocol
designed as part of Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code, also commonly referred to as VS Code, is a source-code editor made by Microsoft with the Electron Framework, for Windows, Linux and macOS. Features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code complet ...
, with implementations for several languages and integrated by several other development tools.
Code comprehension tools
Code navigation tools
Code search engines
Kythe
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