Sourcetrail: Free and open-source interactive source explorer | Hacker News Reader

Sourcetrail: Free and open-source interactive source explorer

github.com

IIRC, this was originally going to be a commercial product, but is now supported entirely by the https://www.patreon.com/sourcetrail

I admire and respect these types of decisions so much.

> In late 2015 we founded the start-up “Coati Software” and started building “Sourcetrail” as a commercial developer tool. We had the vision for Sourcetrail to become the go-to developer tool for reading and understanding all sorts of unfamiliar source code. And of course to become rich and famous on the way.

> Four years passed, and even though Sourcetrail slowly became known and regarded for its advantages in software exploration, it was still only used by a minority of software developers around the world. And we didn't get rich. Not even close. Instead we started losing money on the project by that time. Despite that, we didn't want to follow other companies in the field and go for higher and higher prices, because, as you remember, our goal was to bring the benefits of Sourcetrail to every developer, and not just benefit a few people in a handful of companies.

> But we didn't want to shut down everything and forget about Sourcetrail either. So we decided to steer away from our commercial license model and all the company internal secrecies and bring Sourectrail out in the open. ...

> Of course we have acquired a lot of knowledge while making Sourcetrail and it would be a waste to just open-source the codebase and walk away. We really want to continue working on Sourcetrail. That's why we set up this Patreon page. Here you can help us fund the time we put into further development of Sourcetrail.

Just wow!!

The Smalltalk world also provides such tooling. Which offers a lot more flexibility on how to visualize source code. Unfortunately though it requires quite some effort to learn and use. But once you got the hang of it it's pretty awesome to browse source code and discover it's overall structure. And it allows you to ask more specific questions about the code and visualize the results as you see fit. Which can help a lot in actually finding not so good abstractions and architectural decisions.

https://modularmoose.org/moose-wiki/ http://themoosebook.org/

sourcetrail is the only tool that would enable me to master the entire Firefox 52 and Chromium source code such that I can correctly insert instrumentation hooks in various part of the code, notable JavaScript.

While I paid for the commercial license, I am not disappointed in the slightest.

A must have for deep diving into a project with little or no design document.

They have a great blog post on their mission, journey acquiring customers, and decision to go open source here: https://www.sourcetrail.com/blog/open_source/

They don't seem to be making enough on Patreon even for part-time work yet.

Tangent question, How does small open source tools get sponsorship from the likes of Google and DigitalOcean? Who approaches who? is there some type of formal process?

Be something they don't want to die

This is incredible, I will definitely spend some time tomorrow looking how to help with TS/JS support (if possible)

Yes! This is a much needed thing. It beggars belief that moving through code in this manner is not standard.

Used this awhile ago for a large Python project, was very useful. I would love to use it still, but most of my work is now on rust / golang.

Can't wait to try this when I'm back home. Ive felt this was an underfocused area of devtools needs for a long time.

This looks great. Is there something similar that supports PHP?

This can. Just rig the AST in. I'm going to try a prototype.

Any ideas on incorporating this into IDEA workflow? I feel like, IntelliJ has all the features already minus traversing the graph structure of a code.

Sourcetrail does allow you to select some code block in the graph and have it open up in InteliJ (I don't know about the other way around tho).

I guess I meant: what value does it provide which is not provided by IDEA IDE?

Traversing and displaying code as a graph is indeed the primary use case for Sourcetrail. It's documented at https://www.sourcetrail.com/documentation/ You can also click any part of the code to navigate the graph and vice versa. If you have enough code that this sounds useful, and run a supported language, you'll love it for what it does. And yes, I'm aware that, for Java especially, IDEA has a number of similar code navigation and code graph features. Try both and see which you prefer. :)

The ability to use it when you don't want to run IDEA?

Sourcetrail can run on a server, and you can navigate a large codebase from a 10-year old laptop with little RAM. Or you might be using a different IDE for your embedded C codebase. Etc.

Is there something similar for c#? Maybe resharper? I love this dynamic visual code map, it gives so much more context!

There's no support for Ruby yet #crying

Edit: I've been wanting something like this for ages. Sometimes, I'd draw graphs on paper (similar to what Sourcetrail is doing) to make sense of code. Even my code :).

Ruby is so dynamic that code navigation is not easy. To resolve a method which is implemented via method_missing() in one of base classes, with respond_to?( ) in another base class, you need to instantiate the class hierarchy first and pretend-run some class methods.

Navigation in a statically-typed codebase is much much easier to implement.

Python's been implemented and works well enough with sane codebases. I imagine given Ruby's strong use of conventions, common usages could be covered easily given time.

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