GitHub makes new code search engine based on Rust generally available

GitHub has made its Code Search code search engine generally available. The platform has rewritten the underlying technology to Rust over the past two years, which should make code searches much faster.

GitHub writes that GitHub Code Search has moved out of beta and is now generally available to any user of the platform. Code Search is a tool that allows users to search for specific code snippets from themselves or other developers in public repositories. GitHub also wrote a blog post about how it rewrote the search engine from scratch to a new engine. The company calls it Blackbird.

The search engine is based on Rust. That, according to GitHub, would be more efficient than alternatives like grep, which is used for many other search engines. Rest would scale better with the amounts of code GitHub has. The search engine can do 640 queries per second and index 120,000 documents per second.

According to GitHub, the new Code Search is about twice as fast as the old search engine. The company has also added new features to it. For example, it is possible to search with regular expressions. Also, users can search for code with more syntaxes. Code Search is also designed in a different way, making it more integrated into the platform’s navigation structure.