Show HN: Sourcetrail – Get productive on unfamiliar source code | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Sourcetrail – Get productive on unfamiliar source code

sourcetrail.com

328 pointsnebucnaut117 comments

This looks like an exceptionally useful tool! Thanks for making and sharing it. The video is excellent.

It reminds me of a feature I've always wanted, which would be a code unravel-er. Basically I'd like to be able to select a line anywhere in a codebase, and have said codebase expand to show me the entire execution path as if it were in one single scope, with the ability to re-collapse sections back into loops and functions while reading.

I think it would help to better understand the codepaths that can start to get fuzzy when jumping between abstractions. It would be great - not only for understanding unfamiliar code - but also for double-checking logic across longer code paths.

At any rate - great idea, great implementation, and beautiful website.

If you're looking for a similar tool which does have a code unravel-er look at SciTools Understand[1] for C/C++/Java

My previous company used Understand on a large unfamiliar codebase, it helped greatly, but was pricey.

[1] https://scitools.com/

There's also Source Insight [1] which supports C/C++/Java/Obj-C - quite a fantastic tool, but unfortunately it's Windows only (Wine works with a few hiccups)

[1] https://www.sourceinsight.com/

Wait a second, a tool that supports going through Obj-C is Windows only? That’s .. a shame.

I am playing around with an idea like this for editing Clojure in Emacs with cider-mode. You have to manually build the 'thread' that such a code unravel-er would return, but then you can read and edit functions from many files in one buffer. You start with the highest-level function you are interested in, and then pull the definitions of functions it calls into view as needed.

https://github.com/fazzone/multifiles.el/tree/cider-hacks

I used Sourcetrail a few months ago to figure out a ugly ball of embedded C code that I needed to reimpliment. Sourcetrail was super helpful for this. It paid for itself in an afternoon.

Thank you for the kind words! We are always happy to hear from a satisfied customer :)

Hm does anyone know of a web-based tool like this that uses Clang as a back end? I want to put open source code like the bash and Python interpreters in it and be able to navigate symbolically. And I want nice permalinks.

EDIT: It looks like https://woboq.com/codebrowser.html is what I want. The code available but not under and open source license. https://github.com/woboq/woboq_codebrowser/

I will probably try this, but I'm interested in alternatives!

We built Sourcegraph, which is a web-based code search and navigation tool. Our Python support is in beta, and you can try it out at https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/plotly/dash/-/blob/dash/d.... (And hit Alt+D/Opt+D to search by symbol.) Sourcegraph also supports a bunch of other languages: https://sourcegraph.com/help/languages.

It gives you nice URLs (hit Alt+Y/Opt+Y to get the full commit ID in the URL to make it permanent).

Would love to hear your feedback.

I just spent a few minutes clicking around but had a bit of trouble.

EDIT: nevermind, most of this is due to the fact that you have to keep "repo" in the search box, which I found confusing.

I quickly found the repo I wanted, but discovered that C/C++ isn't supported, so Woboq is more useful to me at the moment.

I tried to build something like this once myself, and made the mistake of going "wide" rather than "deep". That is, trying to support all languages. I think it does make sense to try to get the absolute best experience for one language. But yeah for now since C/C++ aren't supported, it's not useful for me.

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I typed "cpython" in the search box on https://sourcegraph.com/ and got no results. (I also typed "python" and got no results, which seems pretty odd.)

I would have liked to browse this repo:

https://github.com/python/cpython

I guess you have to import repositories yourself? There seem to be sample repositories, but they are in Go, and I'm interested in C/C++ (the Python interpreter, not Python source code).

I'm looking for something that uses Clang as a back end for intelligent navigation of C/C++ projects.

Also, I would like to browse the bash source code, but as far as I know it isn't available on Github. Can SourceGraph import from an arbitrary git repo?

https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=bash

That said I'm glad somebody is working on this problem! I like your mission statement.

Thanks for posting this. We'll think about how we can make that search UX clearer. And when we have C/C++ support, I hope you'll find it super useful.

> Sourcegraph also supports a bunch of other languages: https://sourcegraph.com/help/languages.

That's an interesting link. It only works when you go to "Help -> Language features".

Website feedback: Supported languages is the #1 most important piece of info about this software. It should be front and center and probably repeated a few times already on the landing page.

If I could upvote you more than once; I would.

I left the site not really knowing what language/s are supported.

After digging through the entire page it looks like maybe C/C++/Java?

There should be a huge button, or something, front, and center. <<SUPPORTED LANGUAGES>>

Looks like a cool idea, but I don't know if I can even utilize this tool.

This may be a result of your feedback, but for me looking just now it it front and center: "Sourcetrail - A cross platform source explorer for C/C++ and Java"

Although physically front and center, the fact that that line is nearly the smallest thing on the page caused me to gloss over it entirely my first time through.

I didn't see it either. Was about to ask if it'll work for Rails projects haha

Haha there it is. Who said whining on HN doesn't change the world.

That honor goes to melling: >Some guy whining on HN about a first generation product adds zero value.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9500455

it should be in a bigger font, and it seems like it's the only place where language compatibility is clearly visible without going into the documentation.

I'd suggest second most important piece of info is probably supported editors.

Can you please share the roadmap for adding new language support?

To be honest: We have not decided what language we will pick up next. Our first priority is to improve on our Java coverage. In a few months we should be ready to choose our next language. We are thinking about either tackling Python or implement support for a more recent language like Kotlin, Swift or Go.

I spend a lot of time in clients' ios apps which were developed by other contractors long ago and then I'm asked to fix bugs and add new features. I think this would help me save a lot of time. Since it already supports C/C++ would objective-c support be relatively straightforward to add? Not sure if there are many others who would like to see it, but I know I would definitely appreciate it.

A Lisp might be an easy language to target, because of its consistent syntax and "code is data" philosophy. With Clojure, you could both reuse some of your work on Java, and support Clojure's Java interop. Attempting to support Clojure would drive improvements in the Java support.

I doubt there's very much legacy-ish Kotlin or Swift code out there to be a significant selling point for your product.

Swift would be great. Perhaps you could leverage SourceKit.

Seems to me there is probably a huge amount of legacy Python code around that people need to explore. In fact, I've spent the entire day so far creating some so that we have enough legacy Python code around in a couple more years. Wouldn't want to run short.

Seems to me like the obvious choices would be languages that have large, long standing legacy codebases. Swift code is going to be relatively tight just because it's so recent, whereas something like C# isn't.

Python, Scala and Go would be great additions (in that order).

I might buy this for Go if it was available, this looks interesting!

Note that I'm mainly interested because my current editor of choice does not have the full suite of tools I'm used to for Go. I used to use Vim, and vim-go has such an excellent suite of tools I don't think I'd buy this. However, I've since switched to Kakoune, and the tool support is quite young and I've not had time to improve it myself. So this tool (at the $100 self employment pricing) is a nice fit for a tool I'm on the fence about. At $200 I don't think I would, but at $100 I think I would.

Anyway, just providing a bit of feedback. Looks really nice!

Thank you for sharing your opinion! This will be exactly what we will be interested in when deciding what language to tackle next :)

I know it's easier said than done, but a pluggable interface for community created language support would go a long way towards gaining traction.

C# please!

Um..you already have this if you have visual studio 2015. https://youtu.be/01MzfE8s6G8?t=54

Code Maps requires Enterprise, I think. You can view generated Code Maps from other editions, but you need Enterprise in order to generate them. Kind of unfortunate.

Just a feature request if it isn't already in the works:

Runtime analysis of code that actually matters ie live code.

Often its hard to figure out what in the code base actually matters.

Debugging is still sort of difficult and dead code is really hard to find and get rid of. Particularly if reflection is used heavily which it almost always is these days.

Otherwise (IMO) as a Java developer IntelliJ and Eclipse are actually not that far off in their static analysis and already pretty good to discover the code. Especially IntelliJ as I can easily see them enhancing their code view/discovery as well as they already have static dead code analysis.

I guess I don't think discovering code bases is that much of a problem compared to understand what is actually running.

That is I think debugging particularly multithreaded applications is vastly more difficult problem. Thus runtime analysis would be very useful.

Thank you for your input! I wouldn't call it a feature request though, I'd say it's another tool. But, you are right, exploration of dynamicly analyzed code would also greatly benefit understanding.

I really want something like this for heterogenous codebases. Maybe along the lines of ollydbg and ida but for "reverse" engineering Ruby, python, and go.

Not saying this is bad, but...

Instead of giving money to a tool like this, you could just use ctags/etags, both of which are Free Software. It doesn't show detailed graphs like Sourcetrail does, but it allows source code traversal by function definitions, and supports a crapton of languages.

There doesn't seem to be a vscode plugin for Sourcetrail. Could be a worthwhile addition?

It hasn't been requested so far. Is it actively used by C/C++ or Java developers?

Nevertheless I opened a feature request to track demand: https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/SourcetrailBugTracker/issue...

Thank you again for your request. We now offer a plugin for VS code: https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/vsce-sourcetrail

Has anyone run a large codebase like chromium with this tool? Is the indexing looking at what's compiled like libclang or is it static like gtags?

I'd imagine it's going to violently shit itself. Chromium has pretty good online code search btw.

Yes, but not the kind of visualization and calling stack shown by SourceTrial. Some of the code is 10 layers deep where the stuff actually happens with many complicated usage of inheritance, which I figure is where this kind of tool can shine.

Pretty sure it's compiled,I tried it out and it took a while to process on code that ggtags parses in seconds.

On a first look, it looks amazing. This is actually what I've always imagined "graphical" programming to look like.

This looks super interesting - great video! Everything is processed offline, I assume? No code leaves the machine?

Indeed, everything's offline! You don't even need an internet connection to run Sourcetrail :)

Interesting can you edit code in the text view too? Wonder if this could be the one place to write your code too.

We decided to leave out editing early in the process. Most developers already have their favorite editor and it's a lot of work to implement all features that users would expect from it.

We decided to focus on source exploration instead. Sourcetrail is made for the second screen. We implemented plugins for the most used source editors to enable easy switching. Please have a look at our documentation: https://www.sourcetrail.com/documentation/#CODEEDITORPLUGINS

Cool! Wonder what the graph exploration view would be like if you used a hyperbolic plane to embed it in haha: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_tree

Nice work; seems like you hit a nice medium between trying out something new and keeping it connected to the real world and practical. :)

Slightly tangential.. a code editor was showcased on HN few years back, with context sensitive "panes".. for example currently selected function/variable declarations in another pane. Very impressive stuff, but can't seem to find it anywhere now.

The best similar tool looks like http://brackets.io/, but it only works for HTML/CSS.

Visual Studio 2013 and lower had the Code Definition window, which sounds very similar to what you are describing. It was replaced by the (possibly inferior) inline Code Peek feature in VS15.

It was most definitely not Visual Studio, it was from some startup. But thanks anyway!

Watched the demo video, can you add support to Javascript and Ruby? This is an amazing tool

Looks really good: one possible suggestion would be to allow sharing/reuse of indexes. Let me commit the built index to git and then have someone else checkout and use the index that was prebuilt.

One (potentially paying) alternative would be to provide a precompilation service. Not sure if your index generation can be parallelized, but potentially you could take an archive of the code (or pull directly from Github or Bitbucket or any other repo endpoint) then spin up a large EC2 instance (or the equivalent for your cloud of choice) and accelerate the generation of the index. For large codebases it may provide a good boost.

I had a quick play with this today and it seems like something that could be really useful.

A couple of relatively minor comments for you:

* In C++ it might be useful to filter include guards out of the symbol lists.

* I had some problems with using the menus (couldn't click on them, when I did select them couldn't get the menu to drop down). It's probably just because I'm using a weird window manager (xmonad, no window decorations, Ubuntu 16.04).

I could use something like this for PHP spaghetti code.