The Sourcegraph developer release: A better way to discover and understand code

Today we’re excited to announce a step toward giving every team the power to build better software — the developer release of Sourcegraph, the fast, semantic code search and cross-reference engine.

As developers, we always wanted a better way to discover and understand code:

  • Why can’t your code host actually help you read and understand code like an IDE?
  • Why can’t you see who (and which projects) are using a certain piece of code?
  • Why can’t you see everywhere a function is being called, so you know the right way to use it?
  • Why is code search so archaic — plain-text, single-repository, and ugly?

After reaching hundreds of thousands of developers and hearing from thousands of companies using early versions of Sourcegraph, we knew we weren't alone. That’s why we’re building Sourcegraph.

If you want a better way to discover and understand code, we invite you to start using Sourcegraph today. It’s free for public and private code, it’s integrated with GitHub, and you can start using it immediately.


Already, Sourcegraph is helping developers at startups and large organizations discover and understand code better. In the coming months, we’re excited to share these teams’ stories about how Sourcegraph helps them build better software. These folks tell us they chose Sourcegraph for the following reasons:

With Code Intelligence, Sourcegraph actually understands your code. Your code comes alive when you can browse like an IDE, easily jumping to definitions and viewing docs and type information. It’s hard to go back to browsing code elsewhere once you've experienced this. (Note: It’s currently for Go and Java only; more languages coming soon.)

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On Sourcegraph, everything in code is clickable (jump-to-def) and has doc tooltips. You can understand code more quickly with these.

Live usage examples save time and encourage best practices. With Sourcegraph, you’ll instantly see how any function, class, type, etc., is used across all of your company’s private code and/or open source code. As a wise developer once said, “The right example is worth a thousand words of documentation.”

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At the time this post was published, Fprintf was called in more than 11,000 other projects around the world. See them all!

Smart search quickly gets you what you need. You can search by the name of any function, class, type, etc. 1*0r8ZMCWmXNPgCclHae68CQ

All of Sourcegraph’s source code is publicly available and hackable, under the Fair Source License. But you can use it on Sourcegraph.com without needing to deploy or manage anything.

Sourcegraph.com is free for public and private code. New, paid features will be released publicly in the future.

Sourcegraph Enterprise scales to the needs of large enterprises and gets smarter — not slower — as you add more code. Contact us to see how Sourcegraph can power your large organization.


We are on a mission to give developers a better way to discover and understand code. Start using Sourcegraph today!

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