8 ms·

Working on Chrome made me develop a tool for reading source code

215 points by nebucnaut 10y ago

zfedoran 10y ago
This reminds me a little bit of the IDA disassembler. There are moments where you might face production issues with external JS code and have no source maps available. A tree view to dissect what is going on would be useful in these situations.
realharo 10y ago
The visualization aspect looks quite interesting, but I'm not sure how many things this can do that a quality IDE already doesn't. The example uses the author mentions ("Following code paths from method to method", "Finding where an interface is implemented and which methods get overridden", "Exploring dependencies between types and functions") all sound like pretty standard features today. Plus with an IDE you get the benefit of having them right there in the editor/debugger/etc. and much more. I would however really like something for inspecting the run-time structure of an application's objects. Most debugger views are really clunky for looking at large amounts of data, and even the pretty-print features often don't help much. Having a zoomable graph with the objects right there in front of me would really bring my productivity to the next level.
- noselasd 10y ago
  The DDD debugger has(had ? Not sure it's maintained anymore) pretty useful visualization of data - e.g. like https://bcaptain.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/ddd.png https://bcaptain.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/ddd.png
  - realharo 10y ago
    That's a good start, I'll try that out when I have some time. This specific screenshot however - a linked list - shows a situation where you most likely don't care about the exact structure like this - you only care that it's a list of elements, so most debuggers would show it to you like that - just as a list. The specific raw structure only obscures the parts you care about. Visual Studio allows describing your custom data structures like this using XML files (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj620914.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj620914.aspx), or even custom graphical controls (https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Writing-graphical-debugger-a17e3d75 https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Writing-graph...) and gdb allows you to write a pretty-printer in Python (using an API which I can't find any documentation for :/ ), but it's all kinda clunky and still doesn't deal well with large amounts of data. My ideal tool would be something that combines both of these things - you have - An object graph that you can zoom in/out of that shows raw objects (just like in that DDD screenshot). - An easy way to describe a custom view for your own objects (you can also switch to the raw view for an object, or switch between different defined views, etc.). Just like VS/gdb/lldb allow you to do, but a lot easier and more powerful. You could for example view a specific dictionary that contains complex objects in a tabbed interface, where the keys are tab titles, etc. - A way to live edit these custom views - so that you can rapidly create them without restarting the debugger and restoring the state many times (Visual Studio supports this for the .natvis files). - A powerful searching/filtering/transformation mechanism (e.g. for every object that satisfies this condition, show only this property and sort by that, etc.). - Some way to save these configured views + filters + transformations, etc.
    - Pete_D 10y ago
      gdb's pretty printing API is documented in the texinfo manual, most usefully this page: http://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Writing-a-Pretty_002dPrinter.html http://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Writing-a-P.... I use it a lot, and love it, but I haven't used VS's XML thing to compare. For looking up API documentation I usually drop into `python-interactive` from within gdb and do e.g. `help(gdb.printing)`. Though, you're still limited to string representations that way. If I want to examine a really complex datatype, I'll sometimes write a gdb command to dump some kind of GraphViz output and run it through dot. Or come up with a json representation and explore it using jq or ad-hoc python filters. Looking at your ideal tool checklist - I think it would be possible to build this on top of gdb. I wrote a prototype a while ago that would launch a HTTP server from the gdb prompt, and then you could control it via websockets. Never took it past recreating the prompt with an <input> tag, but someone who was better at front-end work could conceivably do all sorts of nifty data visualizations with it.
      - realharo 10y ago
        Ah, thanks, especially these two parts help a lot https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Values-From-Inferior.html#Values-From-Inferior https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Values-Fro... https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Types-In-Python.html#Types-In-Python https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Types-In-P... Not sure why I had so much trouble finding that back when I needed to change an existing printer.
    - db48x 10y ago
      You would care about the pointers in that linked list if one of them had gone awry.
- westoncb 10y ago
  I'm working on a new kind of tool on those lines—would appreciate any feedback on whether the format I've designed so far would be useful to you (or others). http://westoncb.com/projects/avd http://westoncb.com/projects/avd (I've been thinking about ways of getting to deal with arbitrary object graphs, but an important requirement was to keep it language-independent, so it just deals with common data structure formats at the moment: lists, trees, tables, graphs, hashmaps, etc. —my thinking is most difficult to debug algos are performing operations on these anyhow.)
  - cellularmitosis 10y ago
    This is amazing! Is the UI OpenGL? Is the visualization program a separate process? I'm guessing the main process sends info about the monitored data structures over a socket?
    - westoncb 10y ago
      > I'm guessing the main process sends info about the monitored data structures over a socket? Correct! The UI/server is Java/OpenGL.
barrkel 10y ago
The symbolic lookups and diagrams described are already implemented in modern IDEs. People who rely on relatively simple text editors and text / regex search may be less aware of this, of course. I do agree that visualizations are lacking. In part this is because of difficulties in complete analysis, and rather than do half a job, they don't do any job at all. And in other parts its because different tools do a better job: for example, instrumenting profilers are better at showing control flow. I generally want three kinds of things in my head when reading code: control flow, data flow and data shape. But there are different resolutions to this. Control flow may be simple, at the method level; or it may be more complex, with asynchronous callbacks, queuing systems, RPC, web service requests and orchestrations controlled by configuration. Data flow may be simply knowing where in the code a particular attribute is updated and where it is read and used to make a decision. But it's also about where the data came from ultimately - what all the ingredients are that go into its formation - and also what other data it in turn affects. Data shape has to do with the simple shapes of structures, but diagrams are scarcely needed for that - a glance at the definition of the structure is enough to commit it to short-term memory. More interesting is global invariants, local invariants, longer chains (how you get to one distant structure from another via links), the database model, configuration data model, static data vs dynamic data. Most of the interesting information is at a higher level than can reasonably be analyzed in most Turing-complete languages. The best info comes from profiling or debugging.
- alexc05 10y ago
  Can visual studio do the graphical representation of a C# codebase? A javascript file? Looking at Coati.io it can't do those languages yet, but the graphical flow chart looks really amazing to me and I'de love to try it out on my own code.
  - barrkel 10y ago
    Class descriptions are not only put into diagrams, they're interactive controls. Ten years ago, the model-driven development trends focused on making more and more of the code driveable by UI representations and code. People tried to model code using UML or UML-like representations, with two-way links. Tooling inferred models from existing code. For more current approaches, see "Code Maps" in the VS 2015 release notes here - https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/releasenotes/vs2015-rtm-vs https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/releasenotes/vs2015-... Doing proper control flow is done less often for the reasons I explained. Profilers do it better. See e.g. the Call Graph in AQTime: https://support.smartbear.com/viewarticle/43205/ https://support.smartbear.com/viewarticle/43205/ - it lets you drill through the callers and callees of each function as seen in practice. This means it can see through polymorphism, reflection, dynamic loading, function pointers - all the things that make static analysis infeasible.
mwexler 10y ago
I see comments that "an IDE can do this". Perhaps so. But there are lots of data-discovery missions where you need to learn a codebase quickly that you won't be fully compiling or building yourself. Perhaps you need to replicate an approach, or understand where something in your code needs to change in order to work with the other code that you can't touch. Tools like the OP's could become very handy in understanding a codebase without bringing the entire thing into your IDE. I agree that some pieces only are really comprehensible runtime, but I applaud tools that reflect the need to learn a codebase without necessarily having to (or being able to) bring all the code into your IDE.
- speps 10y ago
  > learn a codebase quickly that you won't be fully compiling or building yourself. I used early versions of Coati (0.5 I think) and it used clang for the backend, loading a new project took ages, probably longer than compiling it in my case. I should try again as they released 1.0 not too long ago.
jasim 10y ago
As someone looking in from outside, the Chrome codebase is a treat. Anecdote. Once during the start of my career I was asked to implement a caching layer in an HTTP library. I had no idea what it was, so there was some reading up to do. There were the excellent guides from mnot.net, as well as the nicely written RFC 2616. But Chrome's code was the best of all - https://github.com/adobe/chromium/blob/master/net/http/http_response_headers.cc#L990 https://github.com/adobe/chromium/blob/master/net/http/http_.... If you want to know for a fact how Chrome decides caching, that code is kind of the heart of it. Recently I needed to retrieve the "Rendered Font Name" that is available in the DevTools "Computed CSS" section. This is the name of the system font that Chrome finally picks, based on the Font-Family property. This is platform specific and so not in DOM, nor available to Chrome Extensions directly. The only way it could be done was by making an extension running in debug mode and communicates to the browser thru its remote debugger protocol. (This part of the documentation is lacking, but it is an esoteric topic anyway). The good news was that the code that does this is well encapsulated and could be easily extracted into a command line utility. For the curious: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/third_party/WebKit/Source/platform/fonts/mac/FontFamilyMatcherMac.mm#129 https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/thir... (there is a nugget about real-world software in the comments) This is, at a surface level, good code to me. Things are easy to find, there is a rhyme and rhythm to the system, and feels welcoming. The thoughts of the people who designed that system over years would be great to hear. Most writing about good code on the internet comes from an OO background, mostly wrt information systems. I wonder what people who've written these systems have to say about building and engineering complex software.
- mattmanser 10y ago
  I'm not a fan of the comments. There's comments that are utterly useless like: // Of course, there are other factors that can force a response to always be validated or re-fetched. Gee thanks, what might those factors be? A comment like that is worse than not commenting at all. Or the real ones that get my goat, comments which just tell you what the code that follows obviously does: // If there is no Date header, then assume that the server response was // generated at the time when we received the response. Time date_value; if (!GetDateValue(&date_value)) date_value = response_time; There's even a line (1019) where they divide by 10 but don't explain why they do it. That's what I personally would comment. The code itself is fairly easy to read (though I do wonder why they bothered using TimeDelta as it just seems to make the code more complicated, and results in confusing code like this:). return TimeDelta(); // not fresh
mrkgnao 10y ago
Chromium Code Search sounds sort of similar to Hoogle. Can anyone with experience of both confirm this? Also -- sort of offtopic, but motivated by TFA -- I'd love some way to find out about quirks that native speakers of $lang have when they speak $otherlang. A few common "tells" that I know, for $otherlang = Englishf are Hyphenating-Things-Like-This and also spaces before exclamation points or question marks !
- 0x4a42 10y ago
  "spaces before exclamation points or question marks !" This is probably related to typographic rules. For example in french you put a space before and after double punctuation marks (!?:;" etc) and a space after single punctuation marks (.,) one exception is the single quote which should not be precedeed nor followed by a space.
mondoshawan 10y ago
This tool looks quite useful for weird build environments with tons of completely undocumented native code such as AOSP (Android) where IDEs regularly fall over.
outcoldman 10y ago
Trial does not allow to try it... You can only try it on some predefined small projects. As I understand the only option for me to try it is to buy a license. Ok, author says that I can get refund in 1 month if I will not like it. But anyway - too much movements for trying. Author please consider to actually give an option to really try it. Another: please add retina icons.
- sexyForkBomb 10y ago
  I was curious about this as well. You can mail them for a "real" trial.
godmodus 10y ago
Trying should be made more accessible. "Looks" promising.
mattnewton 10y ago
This is really cool. One killer feature that I don't know if you have considered is some kind of visualization of the stack trace, showing how control passes between the objects & functions. That would really help with dynamic languages, or large codebases that have been Greenspun-d heavily. It would be very difficult to implement, especially in a cross-platform way, but I bet if you pick a language community like c++, java or something else and focus on it, you might have better results.
hkon 10y ago
Reminds me of the code bubbles and debug-canvas I used to use in Visual Studio
zimablue 10y ago
It's closed source?
zimablue 10y ago
It's closed source?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
manishsharan 10y ago
Java provides an easy way for tracing control flow during program execution: when I join a new contract and am responsible for maintaining legacy java code, I use AspectJ with logging aspects with before and after pointcuts. This helps me figure out the application control flow. I wonder if something similar is available for C/C++.
javathrowaway 10y ago
I feel obliged to mention this talk by Zed Shaw: https://vimeo.com/53062800 https://vimeo.com/53062800 It gives an overview and interpretation of a body of neuroscience research in the context of teaching programming. I can't quite summarize the whole talk succinctly (and don't want to lure anyone with catchy titles either) — but my takeaway from it is that those "visual" programming tools are mostly useless and not going to help significantly. The reason for that being how the brain works: switching back and forth between "visual" and "linguistic" cognition is hard, and requires specific training to do efficiently. Please turn to the talk for references.
fapjacks 10y ago
Incidentally, Webkit is the hairiest pile of code I've ever seen.
general_ai 10y ago
How does it compare to Google Kythe (internally known as Code Search): https://github.com/google/kythe https://github.com/google/kythe?
relics443 10y ago
If it was hosted, and you could point it at a GitHub repo, I'd use it. Otherwise I'd rather use whatever IDE JetBrains has for it. It might not have the exact same capabilities (or maybe it does, I didn't look closely enough) but why use another tool and context if the current one is good enough.
TheMagicHorsey 10y ago
This company is tackling the same problem with a slightly different approach. I like that they have made their tools open source and modular. Theoretically you can use their system with any language by writing a few modules. https://sourcegraph.com/ https://sourcegraph.com/

215 points by nebucnaut 10y ago

This reminds me a little bit of the IDA disassembler. There are moments where you might face production issues with external JS code and have no source maps available. A tree view to dissect what is going on would be useful in these situations.

realharo 10y ago

The visualization aspect looks quite interesting, but I'm not sure how many things this can do that a quality IDE already doesn't. The example uses the author mentions ("Following code paths from method to method", "Finding where an interface is implemented and which methods get overridden", "Exploring dependencies between types and functions") all sound like pretty standard features today. Plus with an IDE you get the benefit of having them right there in the editor/debugger/etc. and much more. I would however really like something for inspecting the run-time structure of an application's objects. Most debugger views are really clunky for looking at large amounts of data, and even the pretty-print features often don't help much. Having a zoomable graph with the objects right there in front of me would really bring my productivity to the next level.

noselasd 10y ago
The DDD debugger has(had ? Not sure it's maintained anymore) pretty useful visualization of data - e.g. like https://bcaptain.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/ddd.png https://bcaptain.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/ddd.png
- realharo 10y ago
  That's a good start, I'll try that out when I have some time. This specific screenshot however - a linked list - shows a situation where you most likely don't care about the exact structure like this - you only care that it's a list of elements, so most debuggers would show it to you like that - just as a list. The specific raw structure only obscures the parts you care about. Visual Studio allows describing your custom data structures like this using XML files (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj620914.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj620914.aspx), or even custom graphical controls (https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Writing-graphical-debugger-a17e3d75 https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Writing-graph...) and gdb allows you to write a pretty-printer in Python (using an API which I can't find any documentation for :/ ), but it's all kinda clunky and still doesn't deal well with large amounts of data. My ideal tool would be something that combines both of these things - you have - An object graph that you can zoom in/out of that shows raw objects (just like in that DDD screenshot). - An easy way to describe a custom view for your own objects (you can also switch to the raw view for an object, or switch between different defined views, etc.). Just like VS/gdb/lldb allow you to do, but a lot easier and more powerful. You could for example view a specific dictionary that contains complex objects in a tabbed interface, where the keys are tab titles, etc. - A way to live edit these custom views - so that you can rapidly create them without restarting the debugger and restoring the state many times (Visual Studio supports this for the .natvis files). - A powerful searching/filtering/transformation mechanism (e.g. for every object that satisfies this condition, show only this property and sort by that, etc.). - Some way to save these configured views + filters + transformations, etc.
  - Pete_D 10y ago
    gdb's pretty printing API is documented in the texinfo manual, most usefully this page: http://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Writing-a-Pretty_002dPrinter.html http://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Writing-a-P.... I use it a lot, and love it, but I haven't used VS's XML thing to compare. For looking up API documentation I usually drop into `python-interactive` from within gdb and do e.g. `help(gdb.printing)`. Though, you're still limited to string representations that way. If I want to examine a really complex datatype, I'll sometimes write a gdb command to dump some kind of GraphViz output and run it through dot. Or come up with a json representation and explore it using jq or ad-hoc python filters. Looking at your ideal tool checklist - I think it would be possible to build this on top of gdb. I wrote a prototype a while ago that would launch a HTTP server from the gdb prompt, and then you could control it via websockets. Never took it past recreating the prompt with an <input> tag, but someone who was better at front-end work could conceivably do all sorts of nifty data visualizations with it.
    - realharo 10y ago
      Ah, thanks, especially these two parts help a lot https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Values-From-Inferior.html#Values-From-Inferior https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Values-Fro... https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Types-In-Python.html#Types-In-Python https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb/Types-In-P... Not sure why I had so much trouble finding that back when I needed to change an existing printer.
  - db48x 10y ago
    You would care about the pointers in that linked list if one of them had gone awry.
westoncb 10y ago
I'm working on a new kind of tool on those lines—would appreciate any feedback on whether the format I've designed so far would be useful to you (or others). http://westoncb.com/projects/avd http://westoncb.com/projects/avd (I've been thinking about ways of getting to deal with arbitrary object graphs, but an important requirement was to keep it language-independent, so it just deals with common data structure formats at the moment: lists, trees, tables, graphs, hashmaps, etc. —my thinking is most difficult to debug algos are performing operations on these anyhow.)
- cellularmitosis 10y ago
  This is amazing! Is the UI OpenGL? Is the visualization program a separate process? I'm guessing the main process sends info about the monitored data structures over a socket?
  - westoncb 10y ago
    > I'm guessing the main process sends info about the monitored data structures over a socket? Correct! The UI/server is Java/OpenGL.

barrkel 10y ago

The symbolic lookups and diagrams described are already implemented in modern IDEs. People who rely on relatively simple text editors and text / regex search may be less aware of this, of course. I do agree that visualizations are lacking. In part this is because of difficulties in complete analysis, and rather than do half a job, they don't do any job at all. And in other parts its because different tools do a better job: for example, instrumenting profilers are better at showing control flow. I generally want three kinds of things in my head when reading code: control flow, data flow and data shape. But there are different resolutions to this. Control flow may be simple, at the method level; or it may be more complex, with asynchronous callbacks, queuing systems, RPC, web service requests and orchestrations controlled by configuration. Data flow may be simply knowing where in the code a particular attribute is updated and where it is read and used to make a decision. But it's also about where the data came from ultimately - what all the ingredients are that go into its formation - and also what other data it in turn affects. Data shape has to do with the simple shapes of structures, but diagrams are scarcely needed for that - a glance at the definition of the structure is enough to commit it to short-term memory. More interesting is global invariants, local invariants, longer chains (how you get to one distant structure from another via links), the database model, configuration data model, static data vs dynamic data. Most of the interesting information is at a higher level than can reasonably be analyzed in most Turing-complete languages. The best info comes from profiling or debugging.

alexc05 10y ago
Can visual studio do the graphical representation of a C# codebase? A javascript file? Looking at Coati.io it can't do those languages yet, but the graphical flow chart looks really amazing to me and I'de love to try it out on my own code.
- barrkel 10y ago
  Class descriptions are not only put into diagrams, they're interactive controls. Ten years ago, the model-driven development trends focused on making more and more of the code driveable by UI representations and code. People tried to model code using UML or UML-like representations, with two-way links. Tooling inferred models from existing code. For more current approaches, see "Code Maps" in the VS 2015 release notes here - https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/releasenotes/vs2015-rtm-vs https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/releasenotes/vs2015-... Doing proper control flow is done less often for the reasons I explained. Profilers do it better. See e.g. the Call Graph in AQTime: https://support.smartbear.com/viewarticle/43205/ https://support.smartbear.com/viewarticle/43205/ - it lets you drill through the callers and callees of each function as seen in practice. This means it can see through polymorphism, reflection, dynamic loading, function pointers - all the things that make static analysis infeasible.

mwexler 10y ago

I see comments that "an IDE can do this". Perhaps so. But there are lots of data-discovery missions where you need to learn a codebase quickly that you won't be fully compiling or building yourself. Perhaps you need to replicate an approach, or understand where something in your code needs to change in order to work with the other code that you can't touch. Tools like the OP's could become very handy in understanding a codebase without bringing the entire thing into your IDE. I agree that some pieces only are really comprehensible runtime, but I applaud tools that reflect the need to learn a codebase without necessarily having to (or being able to) bring all the code into your IDE.

speps 10y ago
> learn a codebase quickly that you won't be fully compiling or building yourself. I used early versions of Coati (0.5 I think) and it used clang for the backend, loading a new project took ages, probably longer than compiling it in my case. I should try again as they released 1.0 not too long ago.

jasim 10y ago

As someone looking in from outside, the Chrome codebase is a treat. Anecdote. Once during the start of my career I was asked to implement a caching layer in an HTTP library. I had no idea what it was, so there was some reading up to do. There were the excellent guides from mnot.net, as well as the nicely written RFC 2616. But Chrome's code was the best of all - https://github.com/adobe/chromium/blob/master/net/http/http_response_headers.cc#L990 https://github.com/adobe/chromium/blob/master/net/http/http_.... If you want to know for a fact how Chrome decides caching, that code is kind of the heart of it. Recently I needed to retrieve the "Rendered Font Name" that is available in the DevTools "Computed CSS" section. This is the name of the system font that Chrome finally picks, based on the Font-Family property. This is platform specific and so not in DOM, nor available to Chrome Extensions directly. The only way it could be done was by making an extension running in debug mode and communicates to the browser thru its remote debugger protocol. (This part of the documentation is lacking, but it is an esoteric topic anyway). The good news was that the code that does this is well encapsulated and could be easily extracted into a command line utility. For the curious: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/third_party/WebKit/Source/platform/fonts/mac/FontFamilyMatcherMac.mm#129 https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/thir... (there is a nugget about real-world software in the comments) This is, at a surface level, good code to me. Things are easy to find, there is a rhyme and rhythm to the system, and feels welcoming. The thoughts of the people who designed that system over years would be great to hear. Most writing about good code on the internet comes from an OO background, mostly wrt information systems. I wonder what people who've written these systems have to say about building and engineering complex software.

mattmanser 10y ago
I'm not a fan of the comments. There's comments that are utterly useless like: // Of course, there are other factors that can force a response to always be validated or re-fetched. Gee thanks, what might those factors be? A comment like that is worse than not commenting at all. Or the real ones that get my goat, comments which just tell you what the code that follows obviously does: // If there is no Date header, then assume that the server response was // generated at the time when we received the response. Time date_value; if (!GetDateValue(&date_value)) date_value = response_time; There's even a line (1019) where they divide by 10 but don't explain why they do it. That's what I personally would comment. The code itself is fairly easy to read (though I do wonder why they bothered using TimeDelta as it just seems to make the code more complicated, and results in confusing code like this:). return TimeDelta(); // not fresh

mrkgnao 10y ago

Chromium Code Search sounds sort of similar to Hoogle. Can anyone with experience of both confirm this? Also -- sort of offtopic, but motivated by TFA -- I'd love some way to find out about quirks that native speakers of $lang have when they speak $otherlang. A few common "tells" that I know, for $otherlang = Englishf are Hyphenating-Things-Like-This and also spaces before exclamation points or question marks !

0x4a42 10y ago
"spaces before exclamation points or question marks !" This is probably related to typographic rules. For example in french you put a space before and after double punctuation marks (!?:;" etc) and a space after single punctuation marks (.,) one exception is the single quote which should not be precedeed nor followed by a space.

mondoshawan 10y ago

This tool looks quite useful for weird build environments with tons of completely undocumented native code such as AOSP (Android) where IDEs regularly fall over.

outcoldman 10y ago

Trial does not allow to try it... You can only try it on some predefined small projects. As I understand the only option for me to try it is to buy a license. Ok, author says that I can get refund in 1 month if I will not like it. But anyway - too much movements for trying. Author please consider to actually give an option to really try it. Another: please add retina icons.

sexyForkBomb 10y ago
I was curious about this as well. You can mail them for a "real" trial.

godmodus 10y ago

Trying should be made more accessible. "Looks" promising.

mattnewton 10y ago

This is really cool. One killer feature that I don't know if you have considered is some kind of visualization of the stack trace, showing how control passes between the objects & functions. That would really help with dynamic languages, or large codebases that have been Greenspun-d heavily. It would be very difficult to implement, especially in a cross-platform way, but I bet if you pick a language community like c++, java or something else and focus on it, you might have better results.

hkon 10y ago

Reminds me of the code bubbles and debug-canvas I used to use in Visual Studio

zimablue 10y ago

It's closed source?

zimablue 10y ago

It's closed source?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

manishsharan 10y ago

Java provides an easy way for tracing control flow during program execution: when I join a new contract and am responsible for maintaining legacy java code, I use AspectJ with logging aspects with before and after pointcuts. This helps me figure out the application control flow. I wonder if something similar is available for C/C++.

javathrowaway 10y ago

I feel obliged to mention this talk by Zed Shaw: https://vimeo.com/53062800 https://vimeo.com/53062800 It gives an overview and interpretation of a body of neuroscience research in the context of teaching programming. I can't quite summarize the whole talk succinctly (and don't want to lure anyone with catchy titles either) — but my takeaway from it is that those "visual" programming tools are mostly useless and not going to help significantly. The reason for that being how the brain works: switching back and forth between "visual" and "linguistic" cognition is hard, and requires specific training to do efficiently. Please turn to the talk for references.

fapjacks 10y ago

Incidentally, Webkit is the hairiest pile of code I've ever seen.

general_ai 10y ago

How does it compare to Google Kythe (internally known as Code Search): https://github.com/google/kythe https://github.com/google/kythe?

relics443 10y ago

If it was hosted, and you could point it at a GitHub repo, I'd use it. Otherwise I'd rather use whatever IDE JetBrains has for it. It might not have the exact same capabilities (or maybe it does, I didn't look closely enough) but why use another tool and context if the current one is good enough.

TheMagicHorsey 10y ago

This company is tackling the same problem with a slightly different approach. I like that they have made their tools open source and modular. Theoretically you can use their system with any language by writing a few modules. https://sourcegraph.com/ https://sourcegraph.com/