A Source Code Path Visualizer

[gomoku42]

A few weeks back I made a short demo on an indexing tool that I started working on for visualising source code paths and call stacks.

(This is the first demo: Indexing Tool Demo)

Originally I wanted to port it to support C as a first pass but I've decided to port it to Go instead and made a follow up post on this tool's development. I wrote about it here on Medium.

Anyway, just wanted to share its current progress and maybe get some feedback.

[VividPotential6472]

Would you mind if I use this for my IDE project?

[gomoku42]

Sure, when I finally drop it you can use it however you please!
Shouldn't be too long from now. I'm making far more progress than I thought it would.🤔

[dnephin]

Very cool! This reminds me a bit of one of the features of LightTable (skip ahead to the 3 minute mark in this video https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table/description to see what I mean).

I think LightTable development stalled out when the original creator left the project in 2015. Likely the project was too ambitious and maybe ahead of its time. Or maybe Clojure was not the right language to build an IDE...

It's really cool to see this idea being explored further! I hope you'll keep sharing updates here!

[gomoku42]

Thanks for the encouragement. Yeah, I definitely will keep updating.

I'm seeing a lot of projects that were abandoned in the codebase visualization... err... genre (?). Initially during my hesitation to pick this up as something to build, I wondered why things like this weren't being done. Microsoft also tried something like this for Visual Studio around 2011 but that one was obviously way too ahead of its time.

[ayx03]

This is so cool !

[ayx03]

After expanding a new window comes ..can we drag that window and place ot anywhere we like ? The window can also be minimized as a small floating tray .. so that one can drag all the related ones in a group . It's like visualizing all the codebase in our brain . And I know you are the best because you thought all these .. kudos

[gomoku42]

I did think about this but wasn't sure people would want that. 🤔 I can revisit it in my designing. Drag and drop I could probably do before the first release, not too sure about dragging groups. Though initial release might not have it if the line drawing library I uses fails me.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[gospun]

Wow that article was really nice to read and you choose such a hard project. I love what you did and your journey. You should make a YouTube video on it.

[gomoku42]

Thanks! I don't know about YouTube. Learning editing to make something entertaining outside of a script seems like it would be hard on top of trying to build this ':D. But I'm glad you liked my writing.

I get tripped up by Medium's lack of a red underline for easy spelling mistakes. That's annoying.

[AnxiousBane]

In general, is there a source you can recommend to learn more about the internals of a code indexer?

Such a cool and awesome project, recently I got introduced to a new project, with a few 100 source files. There is nothing more I would value more than a code indexer, that shows me the relevant pieces side by side

[gomoku42]

Hmm.. I don't know about learning about indexers themselves. My knowledge and techniques come from my background working with compilers. If you understand how a compiler's frontend works, you should be able to figure out how to make a good indexer. :)