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Ask HN: state of the art in source code visualization

3 points by phd_student ↗ HN
I am interested in:

"Given a large source code (say in C), how can I most efficiently figure out how it works?" The best I have so far is emacs/vim + gdb, which has been around for > 1 decade.

Intutively, it seems like there should be tools that can help me better visualizae what's going on inside the code.

The closest I can think of is: doxygen that can generate pretty graphs using AT&T's dot for function call graphs; ... but I hope something more can be done.

[Slightly OT: when I first came across Valgrind, it changed the way I debugged memory errors because it can pinpoint to me exactly the line number and the stack state when I wrote to unallocated space or read in an uninitialized value]

I'm hoping to find a similar tool for understanding large source code bases.

6 comments

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amichail
Check out some of my research on this topic.
phd_student
http://www.sigmod.org/dblp/db/indices/a-tree/m/Michail:Amir.... ?

I'm not seeing any in top tier conferences (for visualization) ... what are the top tier conferences for source code visualization?

amichail
ICSE is a 1st tier conference in software engineering.
phd_student
why didn't you submit any to graphics / visualization conferences?
amichail
I do have a publication in VL'96, which is for visual languages. It's about a new method for teaching binary search tree algorithms using visual programming.

My publications tended to be rather unusual approaches to problems, rather than refinements of existing approaches. They were well suited to software engineering conferences.

Not sure how suitable they would have been for graphics/visualization conferences...

amichail
I should also add that it's not clear how much of my work can be categorized as "visualization". It depends on what you mean by that. But there are several papers that will help you understand code, even if you might not consider them as visualization papers.