Developers searching for quick snippets of code my find themselves turning to Bing more frequently after the launch of a feature that was developed in collaboration with HackerRank.
Bing now offers executable code in search results, which is something not offered by popular developer search engines Stack Overflow and Mozilla Developer Network.
The official announcement states:
“Typically, engineers go to search engines to get answers on various sites like, Stackoverflow, Stackexchange and other blogs. Now, you have a streamlined alternative that will not only spit out the code solution you need but also edit the code and play with it in real-time. No IDE installation required. This will save you endless time you used to spend going back and forth from search to your code editor.”
Here’s how it works. If you want to concatenate a string but only have the most basic idea pf where to start; start searching for “string concat C#” you will now get an accurate solution of how the full piece of code should look.
If you want to edit the code, the results will be presented in an interactive code editor you can run directly in Bing as well to see how it’s going to work.
This has the potential to improve developer productivity as you can troubleshoot the code in the code editor without having to troubleshoot by trial and error.
The code editor supports C, C++, C#, Python, PHP and Java, with more to be said to be on the way soon.
Featured Image Credit: McIek / Shutterstock.com
