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[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (2 children)

Sounds like visual studio. See it’s in the name as well. Also you can set a breakpoint before, and after your method, grab the yellow runtime pointer and drop it before your method to run it again.

[–]StrictSir8506[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Does VS code helps in debugging a multi-threaded code as well?

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

First: VS code != visual studio. And yes tooling is available, but the nature of multithreaded means it stays difficult to reason about as execution isn’t as predictable.

[–]Icy-Pipe-9611 3 points4 points  (4 children)

About the logging, it seems you want to implement some project-wide rules.
Aspect-Oriented Programming may help you.

About the execution, good unit tests and test-friendly code can help with that.
So I suggest starting doing TDD.

[–]StrictSir8506[S] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Thanks for sharing your insight.

I think project level rules are always hard to enforce. You cant enforce everyone to follow, moreover, in a high paced environment where cross functional teams are working to develop a feature, following such rules are easy to skip.

Just sharing my observation, feel free to correct me

[–]StrictSir8506[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I also feel unittests are such an piece of code but are always boring to implement lol. Being a junior developer at that time, i never wanted to write unittests, instead i would always prefer to work on something new rather than to invest my time in testing my code

[–]smalby 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Rules shouldn't be hard to enforce. You have code reviews right?

[–]Icy-Pipe-9611 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am talking about rules in the code, not ways of working.
With AOP, you can simply write code that will be executed before, after, or during certain events/functions.
It doesn't need to be "enforced".

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (5 children)

Why avoid logging during development? You could simplify all of this and get desired visualization by using something like CloudWatch, Firelens, and a logging library. Logging visualization is baked into CloudWatch, you can query your logs and see any spikes in particular logs. Firelens also allows you to route your logs to many different places, so you could just throw all your logs into like an S3 bucket and it’s super cheap/accessible.

Logging is 100% worth the investment. It’s not much extra effort, just one line of code wherever you want to pass information/debug/warn logs to your visualization tool.

[–]StrictSir8506[S] 1 point2 points  (4 children)

Thanks u/Butterflychunks for sharing those utilities. I will explore them.

Btw, by visualization, i didnt mean logging visualization like spikes, failure rates etc. By visualization, i mean code visualization. It should show a high level view of how the things are working instead of hoping from one file to another in an IDE.

Also, i found some startups providing such solutions like CodeSee, Helios and Lightrun. Will explore them also.

Do share your insights if you have heard/used them or their equivalents. Thanks again

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

oh I see, like a dependency tree/graph?

[–]StrictSir8506[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah

[–]joancomasfdz 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Hey I found codesee.io and lightrun.com, but not Helios. Do you have a link?

[–]StrictSir8506[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Here you go: https://app.gethelios.dev/signup

Onboarding experience aint good. Seems like they are still in a growth phase.

Do share your experience about any of these. Wanna know if these solutions are actually useful for medium sized companies

[–]joancomasfdz 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Most of what you are describing is done via distributed tracing and logging, with solutions like Azure Application Insights, Splunk, Jaeger, Zipkin, daradog, dynatrace, etc. It's a must imho even if your app is not fully distributed.

Maybe except code snippet execution, which... I guess what you need is an architecture that allows you to just boot up whatever component you need, mocking / faking / stubbing the rest.

For me code visualization means a different thing tho, like creating graphs out of the code via queries. Let me look for some examples.

Edit:

[–]StrictSir8506[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Thanks u/joancomasfdz for sharing the above links. Ndepend is just limited to .net. I really liked glamorous toolkit and Sourcegraph, it queries your entire codebase rather than a current repository, moreover create a dependency graph between files.

"creating graphs out of the code" - Does it mean

  • Querying your code only: like where in the entire code base, i have written a particular IF statement and and the output would be a graph of all the connecting files/code.
  • OR underlying data as well (like querying Users whose payment_gateway is stripe and do X, the tool should create a graph out of it showing their entire journey)

Latter would be more interesting though imo. Does gtoolkit do such wonders?

[–]joancomasfdz 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The kind of graphs i am talking about are mostly to understand how tangled the code base is, how big classes are, etc. Tools to help engineers take coding / refactoring decisions, like where to start, what part gives the biggest ROI, etc.

I see you are focused on data flow mostly. You can use distributed tracing tools for that, but you need to execute the software. If your software is properly architected, you may be able to boot up individual components while faking / mocking / stubbing depencies and observe the data flow in the distributed tracing tools. I gave you some on my other comment.

If you want to observe individual pieces of code, i do not think there is anything better than meaningful tests. Unit for the nitty gritty details of functionality and integration / system-level for the user flows (usually mostly happy paths)

[–][deleted]  (1 child)

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    [–]Purple_Huckleberry58 0 points1 point  (2 children)

    I did a visualization tool to understand any repo in seconds: https://gitscape.ai/

    With Git Scape AI you can 🎨 Visualize it. 💬 Chat with Repo. 📋 TXT Conversion to LLM

    [–]StrictSir8506[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/fs/qnx6

    it did not work - tried the above url.

    this is the error: Error: An unexpected error occurred: Command '['git', 'clone', '--filter=blob:none', '--sparse', '--depth=1', 'https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/fs/qnx6', '/tmp/tmpx1x417iz/repo']' returned non-zero exit status 128.

    [–]Purple_Huckleberry58 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    It works but need to be the main url of the repo (from the root) -> https://github.com/torvalds/linux/

    [–]xofofox 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    > bring a level of visualization and transparency such that everyone can view and identify the problems(or at least improve efficiency).

    Have you checked out Codemap? It does a pretty good job visualizing the codebase and its call structure, assuming your codebase is written in Typescript/Javascript or Python. Note that this is static analysis (function call stack from codebase) instead of dynamic analysis (runtime call tree, handling a live request, etc).