Developers searching for quick snippets of code may find themselves turning to Bing more frequently after the launch of a feature developed in collaboration with HackerRank.
Bing now offers executable code in search results, a capability not provided by other popular developer search engines.
The official announcement states:
“Typically, engineers go to search engines to get answers on various sites like forums and blogs. Now, you have a streamlined alternative that will not only provide the code solution you need but also allow you to edit the code and experiment with it in real-time. No IDE installation required. This will save you endless time previously spent switching between search results and your code editor.”
Here’s how it works: If you want to concatenate a string but only have a basic idea of where to start, a search for “string concat C#” will now yield an accurate solution showing how the complete 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 within Bing to see how it functions.
This new feature has the potential to improve developer productivity significantly, as you can debug and refine your code directly within the code editor without having to rely on trial and error.
The code editor currently supports C, C++, C#, Python, PHP, and Java, with more languages expected to be added soon.
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