June 11, 2017

Jedi Code Completion with David Halter

42 minutes

Summary

When you’re writing python code and your editor offers some suggestions, where does that suggestion come from? The most likely answer is Jedi! This week David Halter explains the history of how the Jedi auto completion library was created, how it works under the hood, and where he plans on taking it.

Preface

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Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing David Halter about Jedi, an awesome autocompletion and static analysis library for Python

Interview

Introductions

How did you get introduced to Python?

Can you explain what Jedi is and what problem you were trying to solve when you created it?

What is the story behind the name?

While reading through the documentation I noticed that there is alpha support for linting with Jedi. Can you compare the linting approach and capabilities with those found in other tools such as pylint and flake8?

What does the internal architecture and design look like?

From the research that I did for the show it seems that, rather than use the AST to determine the structure of the code being completed you built your own parser and recursive evaluation of the other methods that you use for determining accurate completion?

What was lacking in existing parsers that led you to build your own?

What are some of the difficulties that you have encountered building and maintaining the grammar definitions and higher level API for parsing multiple versions of Python, including the 2 vs 3 split?

What are some of the biggest challenges associated with introspecting user code?

What are some of the ways that Jedi can be confounded by a user’s project?

What are some of the most difficult technical hurdles that you have been faced with while building Jedi?

What are some unusual or unexpected uses of Jedi that you have seen?

What do you have planned for the future of Jedi?

Keep In Touch

davidhalter on GitHub

@jedidjah_ch on Twitter

Picks

Tobias

Patch utility

David

Bears Den

Soccer

Singing

Dancing

DocOpt

OpenStack

Links

Cloudscale.ch

Vim

Youcompleteme

Neocomplete

pyflakes

pycodestyle

pylint

Parser Generator

Parser Error Recovery

lib2to3

Python grammar file

Finite state automata

Type inference

yapf

AST module

MyPy

IPython

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

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By Tobias Macey

4.4

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