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☂️ Code intel paper cuts

Created by: beyang

I've encountered several code intel errors/bugs this morning in https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph that have made the Sourcegraph user experience quite frustrating to the point where I no longer feel like Sourcegraph is adding to my productivity. Here is a sampling:

I have the following user settings:

"lang-go.accessToken": "REDACTED",
"go.accessToken": "REDACTED",
"go.showExternalReferences": true
"go.serverUrl": "wss://go.sourcegraph.com"
"extensions': {
    "farhan/go-imports-search": false,
    "sourcegraph/go": true,
    "sourcegraph/go-imports-search": true,
}
  1. With LSIF enabled, go here and click on the Tracer field in the Tracer struct. Note that there is a reference to this field in the very same file.
  • First time, the tooltip window takes forever (more than a minute?) to pop up. There is no indication that anything is happening in the interim.
  • Sometimes the tooltip window has a "find references" button
  • Sometimes it doesn't.
  • When it does, I click on "find refs" and see "no references".
  • Then I wait a minute (as I'm typing this issue actually), and references pop up.
  • Now, after another minute, the "find references" button has disappeared (I don't think I've touched the UI in the interim).
  • It often takes awhile for the tooltip to show up at all, and then it might be missing the "Find references" button.
  1. With LSIF enabled, go here and click on opentracing.Tracer.
  • Sometimes I get a hover, but no jump-to-def or find-references button. How does it serve me a tooltip without a corresponding j2d? And even if it can't j2d (because it's an external def), shouldn't it at least show me find-refs in the same repo.
  • Sometimes a "Go to definition" button pops up, but only briefly, then goes away.
  • Sometimes, the tooltip itself seems to go away, and then I try clicking around on surrounding definitions, and nothing works for a few seconds. It feels like something has been killed and needs to restart before it comes back online.
  1. Tracer.New has a whole bunch of references, but not "Find references" button appears. image

Now, I add "codeIntel.lsif": false, to my user settings.

  1. Go to traceutil.go.
  • No hovers show up initially.
  • Hovers show up after what feels like 30s of waiting. Falling back to language server, presumably? This feels longer than it used to take.
  • Now references show up. References in general take awhile to populate. (20 seconds?)
  • After reload, the tooltips pop up fairly quickly, but show the spinner. This at least tells me something is making progress.
  • Jump to external defs work!
  • Now, after leaving the page alone for awhile, I come back, and "Find references" button no longer shows up...
  • Works on refresh, but you gotta wait for what feels like reinitialization.

I am leaving LSIF disabled for now, because I feel on the whole it is a better experience, even with the warts described above.

Meta question: I encounter these types of issues extremely often now, and it feels like it has gotten worse over the last few months. Are we dogfooding our own product enough here?