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Google: We're opening Code Search for Go, Angular, Dart, Flutter, TensorFlow and more

Developers can now search through some of Google's major open-source projects.
Written by Liam Tung, Contributing Writer

Google has launched Code Search for several of its popular open-source projects, giving the wider software community what until now has been one of Google's most popular internal tools for developers. 

Code Search or 'CS' for open-source Google projects for now supports Angular, Bazel, Dart, ExoPlayer, Firebase SDK, Flutter, Go, gVisor, Kythe, Nomulus, Outline, and Tensorflow – which represent a small portion of Google's open-source projects, but ones that open-source communities may benefit from search being available on their respective repositories. 

Code Search for Google open-source projects follows the launch of a public Code Search interface for the Android and Chromium projects.  

Kris Hildrum of Google's Code Search Team says Google does plan to provide Code Search for more repositories in future. 

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According to Hildrum, Google engineers use Code Search daily to understand the codebase, for example, to search for half-remembered functions, figure out what calls the function they're looking at, and to spot when a line of code has been changed. There's also a 'blame' button that highlights which user last changed each line of code. 

When users type a term, the search box offers suggestions on the fly with the type of code object, the repository, and the path. Users who want to, for example, search for a function 'foo' in a Google file can specify 'lang:go function:foo' to avoid searching files where foo is just a comment. Other filters include case sensitive, class name, content, file, and symbol. 

Most popular languages can be filtered too, including C++, C, Java, Kotlin, Python, JavaScript, Go, JSON, HTML, Objective-C, Dart, Jango, Perl, PHP, PowerShell, Ruby, shell, SQL, and Swift. 

Some open-source repositories have cross-references enabled by Kythe, Google's open-source tool for creating developer tools. Projects with cross-references include Bazel, Go, gVisor, Kyth, Nomulus, and Tensorflow. 

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"Open-source communities use a broader set of build systems than Google. To support cross-references, Kythe added drop-in support for Bazel, CMake, Maven, and Go," noted Hildrum. 

"Projects using other build systems can use Kythe-provided wrappers for clang and javac to instrument their builds; these are used by Chromium and Android AOSP to provide compilation information for Kythe."

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Code Search for open-source Google projects supports Angular, Bazel, Dart, ExoPlayer, Firebase SDK, Flutter, Go, gVisor, Kythe, Nomulus, Outline, and Tensorflow.

Image: Google
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