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Show HN: Sourcetrail – Get productive on unfamiliar source code

sourcetrail.com

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Re: Show HN: Sourcetrail – Get productive on unfamiliar source code

#51

Post by egraether »

nikki93 wrote: post #47

Interesting can you edit code in the text view too? Wonder if this could be the one place to write your code too.

We decided to leave out editing early in the process. Most developers already have their favorite editor and it's a lot of work to implement all features that users would expect from it.

We decided to focus on source exploration instead. Sourcetrail is made for the second screen. We implemented plugins for the most used source editors to enable easy switching. Please have a look at our documentation: https://www.sourcetrail.com/documentation/#CODEEDITORPLUGINS

Re: Show HN: Sourcetrail – Get productive on unfamiliar source code

#53

Post by nikki93 »

egraether wrote: post #51
nikki93 wrote: post #47

Interesting can you edit code in the text view too? Wonder if this could be the one place to write your code too.

We decided to leave out editing early in the process. Most developers already have their favorite editor and it's a lot of work to implement all features that users would expect from it. We decided to focus on source exploration instead. Sourcetrail is made for the second screen. We implemented plugins for the most used source editors to enable easy switching. Please have a look at our documentation: https://www.sour…

Cool! Wonder what the graph exploration view would be like if you used a hyperbolic plane to embed it in haha: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_tree

Nice work; seems like you hit a nice medium between trying out something new and keeping it connected to the real world and practical. :)

Re: Show HN: Sourcetrail – Get productive on unfamiliar source code

#54

Post by agentgt »

Just a feature request if it isn't already in the works:

Runtime analysis of code that actually matters ie live code.

Often its hard to figure out what in the code base actually matters.

Debugging is still sort of difficult and dead code is really hard to find and get rid of. Particularly if reflection is used heavily which it almost always is these days.

Otherwise (IMO) as a Java developer IntelliJ and Eclipse are actually not that far off in their static analysis and already pretty good to discover the code. Especially IntelliJ as I can easily see them enhancing their code view/discovery as well as they already have static dead code analysis.

I guess I don't think discovering code bases is that much of a problem compared to understand what is actually running.

That is I think debugging particularly multithreaded applications is vastly more difficult problem. Thus runtime analysis would be very useful.

Re: Show HN: Sourcetrail – Get productive on unfamiliar source code

#55

Post by lallysingh »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #23
nebucnaut wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, dynamically typed languages are much harder to tackle :/

You don't need it to be fully automated. For dynamic languages you would have people in the loop to annotate the parts the tool couldn't figure out.

You're best off getting traces from a modified runtime to annotate what's going on.

Re: Show HN: Sourcetrail – Get productive on unfamiliar source code

#56

Post by bigtunacan »

alkonaut wrote: post #52

Website feedback: Supported languages is the #1 most important piece of info about this software. It should be front and center and probably repeated a few times already on the landing page.

If I could upvote you more than once; I would.

I left the site not really knowing what language/s are supported.

After digging through the entire page it looks like maybe C/C++/Java?

There should be a huge button, or something, front, and center. >

Looks like a cool idea, but I don't know if I can even utilize this tool.

Re: Show HN: Sourcetrail – Get productive on unfamiliar source code

#57

Post by ska »

alkonaut wrote: post #52

Website feedback: Supported languages is the #1 most important piece of info about this software. It should be front and center and probably repeated a few times already on the landing page.

This may be a result of your feedback, but for me looking just now it it front and center: "Sourcetrail - A cross platform source explorer for C/C++ and Java"

Re: Show HN: Sourcetrail – Get productive on unfamiliar source code

#58

Post by fusiongyro »

nebucnaut wrote: post #24
peternicky wrote: post #15

Can you please share the roadmap for adding new language support?

To be honest: We have not decided what language we will pick up next. Our first priority is to improve on our Java coverage. In a few months we should be ready to choose our next language. We are thinking about either tackling Python or implement support for a more recent language like Kotlin, Swift or Go.

I doubt there's very much legacy-ish Kotlin or Swift code out there to be a significant selling point for your product.

Re: Show HN: Sourcetrail – Get productive on unfamiliar source code

#59

Post by tylerc230 »

nebucnaut wrote: post #24
peternicky wrote: post #15

Can you please share the roadmap for adding new language support?

To be honest: We have not decided what language we will pick up next. Our first priority is to improve on our Java coverage. In a few months we should be ready to choose our next language. We are thinking about either tackling Python or implement support for a more recent language like Kotlin, Swift or Go.

Swift would be great. Perhaps you could leverage SourceKit.

Re: Show HN: Sourcetrail – Get productive on unfamiliar source code

#60

Post by sqs »

chubot wrote: post #46

Hm does anyone know of a web-based tool like this that uses Clang as a back end? I want to put open source code like the bash and Python interpreters in it and be able to navigate symbolically. And I want nice permalinks. EDIT: It looks like https://woboq.com/codebrowser.html is what I want. The code available but not under and open source license. https://github.com/woboq/woboq_codebrowser/ I will probably try this,…

We built Sourcegraph, which is a web-based code search and navigation tool. Our Python support is in beta, and you can try it out at https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/plotly/dash/-/blob/dash/d.... (And hit Alt+D/Opt+D to search by symbol.) Sourcegraph also supports a bunch of other languages: https://sourcegraph.com/help/languages.

It gives you nice URLs (hit Alt+Y/Opt+Y to get the full commit ID in the URL to make it permanent).

Would love to hear your feedback.

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