Ask HN: Why aren't code diagram generating tools more common?

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS » Mon, Jun 06, 2022, 4:22 AM UTC

irrational wrote: post #109

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretically a proper tool would be able to generate this on the fly - lots of tools to do this on the database side. I’m not aware of many good tools that can do this on the application side - perhaps someone can chime in with some platform specific examples?

But the tool cannot automatically color code certain tables and visually group them together. That is where the real value lies.

I think a tool that did that based on naming conventions would be pretty neat - group tables if they share a prefix “user_” for example. Seems like it would be a straightforward enough implementation in some existing tooling.

Post by graphviz » Mon, Jun 06, 2022, 9:41 PM UTC

porcoda wrote: post #28

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 nee…

Where is the funding for this work? Customers want to solve end-to-end problems, now, so it's difficult to get support for deep work on a particular part of the visualization and analysis stack (for almost anything, not just code).

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't code diagram generating tools more common?

Re: Ask HN: Why aren't code diagram generating tools more common?