Big Techday 23: Glean: Query your Code [EN] - Simon Marlow, Meta Research

Simon Marlow introduces Glean, Meta's open-source code indexing system, and its custom query language Angle designed for querying codebases.

Code indexing is the technology underlying many of the essential tools in the developer's workflow, from IDEs to code search to analysis tools. But code indexing is fragmented: it's usually done differently for each language and even each tool. Technologies like LSIF aim to unify across languages, but are aimed at specific tools or use cases. Glean is an open-source code indexing system we're building at Meta that fills the gaps: scaling to multiple languages, to very large codebases, and crucially including a flexible and powerful query language ("Angle") designed specifically for querying data about code. In this talk I'm going to cover the design of Glean and in particular its interesting query language, and also cover some of the ways that functional programming was useful in building Glean.