Reading Code - helpful visualizers and browser tools

Posted by wishi_ on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by wishi_
Published on 2010-04-25T11:35:54Z Indexed on 2010/04/25 11:43 UTC
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Hi!

I find myself reading 10 times more code than writing. My IDEs all are optimized to make me edit code - with completion, code assist, outlines etc. However if I'm checking out a completely new project: getting into the application's logics isn't optimized with these IDE features. Because I cannot extend what I don't fully understand.

If you for example check out a relatively new project, frama-c, you realize that it has got plugins that are helpful to gain insight into "unfamiliar code": http://frama-c.com/plugins.html - However of course the project has a different scope. What I'm fully aware of.

I'm looking for something that does helpful things for code-reading. Like:

  • providing a graph, - reverse engineering UML e g.,
  • showing variable scopes
  • showing which parts are affected by attempted modifications
  • visualizing data-flow semantics
  • showing tag-lists of heavily utilized functions
  • ...

My hope is that something like that exists. - That there're some Eclipse plugins I don't know or that there's a code-browser that has some of these features?

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