Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Great article, and beyond nostalgia, it's also a good lesson about UX and dangers of SaaS.

A tangential question. The article says:

> In the same vein as the Reports, you can see at a glance what links to what. It's a lot like the call chart in a software development IDE.

I read it and I have to ask... which IDE shows nice call charts like that? I've worked with a bunch of those (every Java IDE, C++ in old and new Visual Studio), and there's dearth of any kind of visual representation of anything in general, call graphs in particular. I can sometimes make Visual Studio to begrudgingly show me the static call graph as two trees (one for "who calls me", and other for "who is called by me"), but on a moderately-sized codebase this essentially hangs the IDE.

It's obvious that codebase exploration features would be nice to have. But where are they all hidden? In Enterprise editions of IDEs?

You get reasonably decent call charts from profilers.

Many IDEs include a profiler or support third party profiling, with call charts. Or you can use a standalone profiler which understands the relevant debug info.

An advantage of using profiling is that you get dynamic insight into what may be relatively obscure control flow linkages. The disadvantage, of course, is that it's not complete, if your profiling run didn't include the call, it won't be in the tree.

Author here. I was mostly thinking of National Instruments' LabVIEW and disassembly programs like IDA and Ghidra. Those in particular have actual callgraphs, although LabVIEW is a graphical language anyways so of course it would. You might also see dependency graphs in OOP IDEs, for seeing what inherits what.

I didn't bother to put this detail in the article because this little tangent distracts from the point a bit.

IntelliJ bidirectionally maps code to UML diagrams by itself and some plugins use the same UI to show call graphs and the like.

Isn't that Enterprise Edition, though? I don't recall it being in Community the few years ago I was working in a Java shop.

Eclipse can show the call hierarchy for Java from a shortcut, for what that's worth.

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