Re: Exploring a code base?

[Christopher Dimech]

There is the Graph Description Language, Dot.

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Christopher Dimech
General Administrator - Naiad Informatics - GNU Project (Geocomputation)
- Geophysical Simulation
- Geological Subsurface Mapping
- Disaster Preparedness and Mitigation
- Natural Resource Exploration and Production
- Free Software Advocacy


> Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2020 at 12:38 PM
> From: "Yuri Khan" <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>
> To: "help-gnu-emacs" <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
> Subject: Exploring a code base?
>
> Hello list,
> 
> often, when working on a project, I encounter the following need:
> 
> * I want to refactor a data structure. It has a unique name, let’s say
> Foo, so I ‘M-x grep RET git grep Foo RET’. This gives me a Grep buffer
> where I can inspect each place where that type is used explicitly.
> 
> * I find that I have a function, let’s call it make_foo, that returns
> an instance of that type. There is also a consume_foo that accepts an
> argument of that type. I now want to inspect all usages of those
> because my refactoring may affect them. So I put point on make_foo and
> invoke ‘xref-find-references’.
> 
> * This leads to more functions that return Foo. I may want to inspect
> each of those recursively.
> 
> Basically what I’m doing is traversal of a graph, where nodes are type
> and function definitions, and edges are relationships such as
> “function <calls> function”, “function <accepts> type”, “function
> <returns> type”, “type <derives from> type”, “type <aggregates> type”,
> etc.
> 
> When the change I’m doing is not very invasive, the affected subgraph
> fits completely in my head. However, when it doesn’t, I find myself
> having to record my traversal state. I create an Org buffer and
> manually maintain a queue of nodes, marking those I haven’t yet
> visited with TODO and those I have with DONE. Then I pick the first
> TODO, grep or xref-find-references on it, add any relevant nodes to
> the queue, make the necessary changes in the code, and mark the node
> DONE. Repeat until no TODO.
> 
> This is rather tedious. It feels like there should exist a better way,
> maybe with a visualization of the graph structure.
> 
> What do you use to explore and map a code base and perform extensive
> changes on it?
> 
>