Is there a whole universe of Chinese software that we don't see?
China is obviously a major world player, but we rarely see articles/repos/posts/etc., that seem to originate from there, translated or not, or simply referred to. Are we missing out on lots of cool advancements from China? Or do Chinese engineers generally publish in English? Is there some massive Chinese GitHub with cool stuff we don't know about? Science is science and I can't shake the feeling that we're missing out on stuff, but I really have no idea. Would love to hear people's thoughts.
I work for a multinational tech firm, at their Beijing office. There is no equivalent of massive Chinese Github. Github is used heavily by Chinese developers. There are projects incubated in Chinese tech startups and eventually open sourced, for example the Beego Go web framework.
Due to the Great Firewall of China, there is almost a Chinese-only tech ecosystem of Android apps, and other "mini-apps" built on top of Wechat. For example, Jinri Toutiao is a popular app that is almost unheard of outside of China.
In Reactjs, the Ant Design library is built and maintained by a Chinese company called Ant Financial: https://ant.design/ I believe they're the second most popular React UI library on Github by stars
I believe the Chinese web world is pretty big on using Vue.js, Golang and React from what the top Chinese tech companies talk about in their blogs
Also I can read Simplified Chinese and the most popular Github repos in Chinese seem to be individual blogs, tech interview help and like frontend/backend guides. Github seems to be almost used as a content-based social network by Chinese users based around blogs and tech help
See: https://qz.com/1280215/four-of-the-top-25-github-projects-ar...
Chinese researchers are in many state of the art projects along with others. Maybe that's why they are often overlooked (or they aren't, because they are doing really well inside/outside China). Even VueJs was created by a Chinese.
If you can understand a bit of Chinese you can search on Baidu, or CSDN, Zhihu, Jianshu etc (kind of like SO, Quora, Medium in Chinese). In fact, there's a Chinese clone of almost any major international website that the majority of people in China use. They also have their own translation of programming terms , which you'll see in code comments.
Eye-opening to me was browsing https://eu.alibabacloud.com/ We talk a lot about Google Cloud, AWS, Azure and smaller ones like Digital Ocean, Linode and such but Alibabacloud I hardly if ever see articles or tutorials about.
Apache Kylin was actually China’s very first top-level Apache project. It did come out of eBay, but the work all originated in China. It’s a really cool solution to query acceleration.
You can learn about it on the community page here: http://kylin.apache.org/
It’s pretty popular across China, and I’ve seen it come up a bunch in Europe/South America, but in the U.S. it’s pretty new to a lot of folks.
Chinese social and ecommerce companies contribute new features to Mariadb (MySQL.)
Quora mentions GitCafe and Coding.net in China.
Chinese people write in Chinese mainly, but I imagine programmers can get around in English. (If you go to an airport in China, often none of the staff speak English except for perhaps the foreign visitor kiosks, but even then.)
Japanese Open Source in the 1995-2010 era always meant 1-way forking and localizing it in Japanese, but that might have changed as projects increasingly added i18n support. (If you're familiar with Japanese writing, there were obvious reasons for that.)
Most people don't consider programming science, but ok.
From the consumer side there's a totally different ecosystem of apps (or A-P-Ps as everyone calls them) used for almost everything. I travelled to China last year for work and would have been completely stranded without the person our supplier assigned to us to look after us.
Cash is basically not used, with everyone using either WeChat or Ali payments via mobile apps (which as far as we could tell you can't activate without a Chinese bank account). Even the person hawking souvenirs in the the queue at the great wall only accepted mobile payments, the only place that would accept a western card was one particular Xiaomi store.
On the second day we were there we decided to buy a coffee near the office before going in, only to be thwarted by the fact you could only order via a mobile app. The person working there literally could not accept an order manually via the till, and we couldn't install the app to place one because it was only available on the Chinese version of the app stores. After that we mostly just accepted the fact we weren't going to be able to function independently.
One project I use on a daily basis that isn't well known (and is by a Chinese developer) is Vimium C (https://github.com/gdh1995/vimium-c). It has similar functionality to Vimium, cVim, Vimperator, Pentadactyl and the like—browser navigation using vim-like shortcuts. Vimium C is quite customizable, offers great functionality, and the developer seems quite responsive to issues. The code is written in TypeScript and I found it easy to read. Highly recommended.
Ant-design, ECharts, Vue.js, fastjson, Kylin, dubbo, RocketMQ, Pulsar, Harbor, SkyWalking...
Actually more repos are contributed by the worldwide developer but not just one country or person (such as vue.js, the founder is Chinese but runs by the open-source community power, and that's why we call it open-source software, everyone has the opportunity to contribute and use. That different from Company behavior).
I do think there is. For me, part of the realization was to play around with the explore feature of Github and sort by most stars / trending in a given language (in my case Java).
https://github.com/trending/java?since=monthly
A VERY large portion of the repos are actually written in chinese :).
The fact is that almost every resources are written in Chinese. If you can read Chinese you can find plenty of, tons of useful and interested stuff. The reason those are not written in Chinese is that they don't actually need western people to read and discuss with them. Chinese developers are enough for discussion, tech talks...
Very probably. We don't normally see it because English-Language websites will consciously downvote to oblivion anything that isn't in English.
Turn on "showdead" in your HN profile, and you'll generally see at least one foreign-language article every day in the hidden [dead] posts that's been bundled out of sight.
There's CoC - "conquer of completion" among others (sick name btw), a JS based language server for Vim that gives it VSCode like powers. I've seen a lot of code editor tooling from China (I like hover over GH user thumbnails of interesting tools).
I actually liked WPS Office which does not seem to be based on Open/Libre office and looks more compatible with MS Office.
But in the recent years, I just purchase MS Office licenses, so I am no longer aware with the current state of MS Office alternatives.
There's a giant ecosystem of Chinese tech on the consumer side, which is radically different from what we experience in the West. There's also Alibaba Cloud, which by some measures is bigger than GCP but is just a clone of AWS.
In the Go community, there is a significant portion of libraries and development from China. When visiting the Github's Trending page for Go, sometimes I need to filter by written language because everything is in Chinese.
There's a lot of Chinese software and libraries in the Go ecosystem.
Honestly, I dont think so. I think they mostly use our code. If you look on github, there are a bunch of chinnese repos. But there arent state of the art implementations of things like distributed queues that are better than what we have