Ask HN: Visual Code Explorer?

1 pointbern44443 comments

I'm wondering if someone knows of a tool that, given an entrypoint into a code base, creates a graph over all functions showing which functions call others.

Such a tool would be especially useful for onboarding into new codebases, understanding what parts of a codebase are "hot", providing insight into risk of refactoring and a visualization of how code flows throughout the system.

Anything out there that does this?

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I know there are some tools that generate dependency graphs. Their accuracy and workings are very dependent on the language you want to use. I think Visual Studio had something like that integrated for C# at least, possibly for other languages too.

But there are some other tools for languages like JavaScript where such a graph generation might be a bit more involved.

There are some tools for architectures too, but I have never used them. For VSCode I know of Code Graph that might visualize usages of function etc.

Visual Studio DGML. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ChrisLov...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43405698/directed-graph-...

Code Map is another tool - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/modeling/use-c...

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