Ask HN: Working with large code base for the first time

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • ripgrep

    ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore

  • Gource

    software version control visualization

  • If you use Git, Mercurial, Bazaar or SVN and would like to visualize where most of the recent effort of development has gone into and what people have worked on the most, have a look at something like Gource: https://gource.io/

    In my eyes, those visualizations are really nice for an overview of how the project has evolved.

    Personally, i've also had good experiences with Sourcetrail, for seeing how bits of code fit together within a codebase, although the development on it has ceased recently: https://www.sourcetrail.com/

    Also, some are recommending text editors with plugins or specialized tools, but i'd also like to suggest just getting a really good IDE that's integrated with the tech stack that you use. Personally, JetBrains fills that niche for me: https://www.jetbrains.com/products/

    Depending on the language and framework support, it can lead to an amazing development, refactoring and testing experience, albeit has some drawbacks in comparison to text editors like Visual Studio Code - it uses more memory and CPU resources (especially when indexing the project, a tradeoff that most IDEs out there make in one way or another) and also is a paid product, i just got the Ultimate package of all tools for my personal and work needs.

    Apart from that, i'm not even sure - jumping around definitions in source code and seeing how different things are connected, what the dependency graphs are like and so on is nice, but understanding why things were built that way might require ADRs (https://adr.github.io/) which many companies still don't use, or trudging through issue management systems (like seeing what issue a piece of code was developed under, then reading the user story in Jira etc.).

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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