I’ve had this need a few times. Just a couple weeks ago I needed to quickly understand the set of package dependencies within a codebase and wrote some scripts that extracted a report as well as a graphviz file. I’ve done that a few times over the years. The biggest obstacle to a general purpose tool usually is the compiler front end that is needed to correctly parse the code to get the entities and relations you need to visualize. Without that it’s hard to write a reliable tool for extracting the information, and if you care about multiple languages you need multiple front ends.

People do want it (contrary to the common HN refrain of “well, I don’t want it so clearly nobody wants it”). We’ve had customers where I work specifically ask for these kinds of tools. They’re just harder than they seem to write, not only for the parsing reason I mention above. For many codebases you see a giant ball of spaghetti if you look at the full graph, or the layout algorithm gives you something gigantic and hard to browse. That’s a deficiency in graph visualization tools: again, a hard problem with little good tooling out there.

I’d love to see more work in this area since there do exist people who see value in it, contrary to the skeptics.