Kythe was slightly after my time on Grok. It was a side-effort by the Grok team, and it's frankly a miracle they got it out at all. Google only really supports a few big open-source projects - Chrome, YT, k8s. Kythe fell waaaay below the line.
I'll be taking another look at Kythe, and reaching out to the current Grok team, as we expand scip. But ultimately it didn't matter what protocol/format we standardize on. We just need to standardize. So it's scip!
And it is still garbage. Can it differentiate between the declaration, definition, and calls of a function Foo, versus just substrings "Foo" found anywhere in the file, such as comments? Nope.
1) How can you write this whole article without saying "Kythe"?
2) How exactly can github search be as bad as it is? With all of Microsoft behind it, you'd think it would be a lot better than it is.