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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

I can't help thinking that it should then be possible to write a tool that ingests a codebase and shows you a graph similar to the ones in this article. Perhaps that would be a good way to figure out where to start working on reducing the code complexity. But I have to think on this for a while to see if I still believe it after mulling it over.

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Ages ago (back when Python 2.5 was still a thing) I used a lib that would generate a call graph for Python programs. I think it was this one:

  http://pycallgraph.slowchop.com/en/master/

I don't remember much, but I think this wasn't terribly useful at the time, because it became very messy very quickly. Any moderately complicated application will be calling a dozen functions, and the graph then becomes a gigantic mess of interconnected nodes which is very hard to read.

But like I said, it was ages ago, so I don't know how good/bad it is now.

For Python there is Snakefood. I have had good results using it on a huge hairball project to discover interesting and useful things about the topology of the module dependencies.

http://furius.ca/snakefood/

http://furius.ca/snakefood/doc/snakefood-doc.html

Sure that's possible. I saw Matt Mackall do it for Mercurial first:

https://www.selenic.com/blog/?p=626

In rust, there's cargo-graph to do this for your packages:

https://github.com/kbknapp/cargo-graph

I used that on Servo once see PNG at https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/files/servo-graph.png or SVG at https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/files/servo-graph.svg.

From these explorations, I think the four color theorem-type planarity or connectedness is actually less important than a lack of cycles for the perceived complexity, or the difficulty encountered due to that complexity.

See the work by Adam Tornhill

https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWhBmJJZoNM

https://pragprog.com/book/atcrime/your-code-as-a-crime-scene

https://pragprog.com/book/atevol/software-design-x-rays

yea, that's been one of my goals. I would like to visualize the graph over time to see how the complexity grows.

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