depict
Sourcetrail
depict | Sourcetrail | |
---|---|---|
2 | 46 | |
26 | 12,302 | |
- | - | |
6.6 | 7.0 | |
12 months ago | over 2 years ago | |
Rust | C++ | |
MIT License | GNU General Public License v3.0 only |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
depict
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A CSS-Inspired Syntax for Flowcharts
One potential solution direction, which you can try out via my own incomplete drawing toy [1] is to treat punctuation characters like SP (“ “), COMMA (“,”), and SEMICOLON (“;”) as markers for the product operations of a family of monoids that allow you to specify more and more complicated sequences without requiring the typist to “move the cursor left” to add a matching character.
This way, simple lists can be specified via juxtaposition:
a b c
And then more complex lists
thing 1, thing 2, thing 3
and still more complex lists like
A complex thing; with data, and more data
can be specified in a way that is potentially still human-legible and easily editable.
Combined with ~instant feedback while typing and, ideally, a “brushing” system to allow selection of parts of the textual model via the linked drawing, I am hopeful that this can be solved resiliently, at least for the most common use cases.
(Part of why I am excited about OP’s work here though is that while I have done a fair bit in my own project on drawing a related kind of diagrams, I have myself only begun thinking about how to make the resulting drawings nicely stylable/themeable.)
[1] https://mstone.info/depict/ -> https://github.com/mstone/depict
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Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?
You might find it helpful to distinguish between visualizing the design of the system being implemented by your software, visualizing protocols being implemented by your software, visualizing the design of the your software itself, and visualizing important implementation details at runtime, e.g. for debugging, profiling, and operations.
For visualizing system designs, you should take a look at STAMP, e.g., via “Engineering A Safer World” + the resources at mit.edu/psas + on YouTube.
(Multiple tools, both commercial and libre, exist and are being developed to make these diagrams, although for what it’s worth, I mostly hear about people making them using draw.io, Google Drawings, on physical paper/whiteboards, or occasionally with specialized tooling.
I have also recently published a project in this area, https://github.com/mstone/depict, which I believe is well on its way toward addressing some unmet needs here.)
For visualizing protocols, things like sequence diagrams, data flow diagrams, DRAKON flow charts, value stream maps, and occasional more specialized objects like CPSA “cryptographic protocol shapes” / strand space skeletons are where I start depending on the flavor of what’s needed.
For visualizing the design of implementations themselves, I have not yet seen anything that I feel obliged to recommend; rather, here, I suggest investing in adding illustrations to your existing documentation in whatever way is easiest for you to use to clarify whatever subtleties you need to clarify for your audience.
(Here I tend to look at things like ASCII-art, SQLite’s railroad diagrams (now made with pikchr, AIUI), and sequence diagrams, as mentioned by other commenters, as helpful examples to start with.)
Finally, for implementing debugging/profiling/operational illustrations, there is a such a rich set of examples to turn to — whether from the very specialized (custom process model video rendering pipelines in robotics) to TensorBoard for TensorFlow to general-purpose tools like browser performance debugging suites, flame charts, or Go’s built-in profile graphing tools - that rather than learn any particular such tools, I’d instead suggest trying to get comfortable with the building blocks underlying these systems, which include contemporary GUI/web apps, custom drawing and animation tools like SVG, pretty printers, and Grammar-of-Graphics systems like vega-lite.
(Note: although it may seem superficially extraneous to your question, the reason I also suggest thinking about debugging visualizations in this context is because IMO, to work, they ~necessarily encode a visual model of the design of your implementation since it is the design of the implementation that provides the vocabulary and relationships that have to be understood and navigated in order to successfully debug/optimize/monitor any given running instance of whatever system you are building.)
Sourcetrail
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Ask HN: Anyone use a code to mindmap/flowchart tool?
I wish something existed in this space. I used Coati Software's Sourcetrail for a couple of years. Unfortunately it was discontinued. It was a wonderful piece of software that indexed a code repository, and exposed an interface to explore it interactively. At least for me, it significantly improved the understanding and legibility of code.
The code is in an archived state (https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail). Searching for the software on Google shows some screenshots.
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Ask HN: What would an IDE built for the Apple Vision Pro look like?
I think it might make large scale code visualization in a similar way to how SourceTrail does it more feasible: https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail
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How to quickly learn/understand the system architecture of any given application?
Sourcetrail: Free and open-source cross-platform source explorer https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail
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Tools/software for visualizing code structure/dependencies of large C project.
Yep souecetrail https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail
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Tools to understand a new code base
I've used https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail in the past for some bits of the legacy code project I'm on. I also use vim and cscope for day to day navigation but it's harder to get a big picture with those alone.
- Is there a site or extension where to learn C++ by doing, learning more visually?
- “Zoom Out”: The missing feature of IDEs
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Tools for Building Symbol Tables from A Source Code File
Sourcetrail?
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A Byfrost Indexer Update-A Graphing Demo
Does it strive to do what Sourcetrail used to ?
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How to understand a c++ project
You could always try using Sourcetrail. Unfortunately the open source project is now archived but it should still help you get insights into your code.
What are some alternatives?
spekt8 - Visualize your Kubernetes cluster in real time
Spotbugs - SpotBugs is FindBugs' successor. A tool for static analysis to look for bugs in Java code.
ScrivanoForLinux - Scrivano is a notetaking application for handwritten notes.
PMD - An extensible multilanguage static code analyzer.
shotglass - Tools to visualize large code bases in different ways.
Checkstyle - Checkstyle is a development tool to help programmers write Java code that adheres to a coding standard. By default it supports the Google Java Style Guide and Sun Code Conventions, but is highly configurable. It can be invoked with an ANT task and a command line program.
Pythonocc-nodes-for-Ryven - Pythonocc nodes for Ryven
infer - A static analyzer for Java, C, C++, and Objective-C
TypeScript-Call-Graph - CLI to generate an interactive graph of functions and calls from your TypeScript files
Gource - software version control visualization
plurid - Explore Information as a 3D Structure
FindBugs - The new home of the FindBugs project