Monday, 6th February 2023
The technology behind GitHub’s new code search (via) I’ve been a beta user of the new GitHub code search for a while and I absolutely love it: you really can run a regular expression search across the entire of GitHub, which is absurdly useful for both finding code examples of under-documented APIs and for seeing how people are using open source code that you have released yourself. It turns out GitHub built their own search engine for this from scratch, called Blackbird. It’s implemented in Rust and makes clever use of sharded ngram indexes—not just trigrams, because it turns out those aren’t quite selective enough for a corpus that includes a lot of three letter keywords like “for”.
I also really appreciated the insight into how they handle visibility permissions: they compile those into additional internal search clauses, resulting in things like “RepoIDs(...) or PublicRepo()”
Making SQLite extensions pip install-able (via) Alex Garcia figured out how to bundle a compiled SQLite extension in a Python wheel (building different wheels for different platforms) and publish them to PyPI. This is a huge leap forward in terms of the usability of SQLite extensions, which have previously been pretty difficult to actually install and run. Alex also created Datasette plugins that depend on his packages, so you can now “datasette install datasette-sqlite-regex” (or datasette-sqlite-ulid, datasette-sqlite-fastrand, datasette-sqlite-jsonschema) to gain access to his custom SQLite extensions in your Datasette instance. It even works with “datasette publish --install” to deploy to Vercel, Fly.io and Cloud Run.