Sourcetrail profile

Sourcetrail is a free open source cross-platform resource browser that helps you improve your productivity if you are unfamiliar with source code.

Sourcetrail has advantages over other development tools

Software developers spend most of their time making sense of existing source code, but generic code editing tools do little to help with this task. The debugger allows only a narrow code path to be examined in detail. Find All References helps you navigate between files, but it does not provide context to see an overview of all related dependencies. Sourcetrail provides an overview and detailed information by combining interactive dependency diagrams, concise code views, and efficient code searches, all of which are superior to other development tools. It enables you to explore legacy code, understand the implementation, and refactor the software architecture.

IDE supported by Sourcetrail

Atom, Clion, Eclipse, Emacs, IntelliJ IDEA, Neovim, PyCharm, QtCreator, Sublime Text, Vim, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code

Sourcetrail supports languages

  • C
  • C ++
  • Java
  • Python
  • custom

Why Sourcetrail? (Following is from official website)

  • The reality of software development

    As software engineers, we know we have the skills and ability to implement all of our ideas. But sometimes, it’s harder than we expected. Professional software development is usually a team effort. Teamwork enables us to solve tougher problems, but it comes at a cost. As the code base grows, keeping track of each code addition becomes more and more complex. As a result, more effort is spent researching the current implementation and less on writing new features. New developers often have to spend days or even weeks browsing through old code to familiarize themselves with implementation before they can actually go into production.

  • Programming languages are not a problem

    Programming languages are constantly evolving. By eliminating more and more computer restrictions, they reduce the overhead that software developers need to remember. However, regardless of the language, it is difficult to maintain a consistent mental model of the source code structure if a project reaches a certain size. The problem here is not the abstraction of the language, but the density of information in the code. Every line in the source code has a purpose, and as software developers, we will spend most of our time searching for small pieces that are currently relevant. Why not take a step back and look at how components are connected instead of constantly looking at every detail of the code?

  • We already have enough code editors

    When writing code, we have a variety of options to fit into any workflow we want. What is harder to solve is how effectively we understand existing implementations. Although there are many excellent code editors out there, they are designed for writing code, not for browsing the implementation at hand. Of course, every developer has his or her own strategy for finding information from the source code, from searching for documents to viewing tests, or asking the original author when available. However, when you run out of all these options, you inevitably iterate through the code. Let’s face it – digging deep is something most programmers would rather avoid.

  • The computer knows all this!

    It is not difficult to understand the basics of your software architecture. Obviously, know what objects are involved in the functionality and the path the functionality takes through the source files. Funny thing about all this? Your computer knows all this. By using a compiler or interpreter, your computer already knows how the language works. It knows which paradigms exist because it converts the source code into executable instructions. It knows everything in the entire code base: where to call a function, how to instantiate a type, where to change a variable. So far, this information has been cumbersome for our developers to access, but it can be easily done using Sourcetrail.

  • Meet Sourcetrail, the interactive source code browser!

    We hope you come across Sourcetrail, a lightweight code visualization tool designed for quick and comprehensive navigation through source code. Sourcetrail leverages software visualization to dynamically generate interactive code maps of any selected type, function, variable, etc., and display all of its dependencies with the rest of the code base. But fancy code visualizations or class diagrams alone won’t let you really know anything about the source code. This is why Sourcetrail also shows relevant code snippets alongside the visualizations. Finally, the package is complete with powerful code-searching algorithms to get you started as quickly as possible. Sourcetrail cuts down on the time you spend reading source code and frees you up to spend more time doing what you actually like to do as a software developer. Start using Sourcetrail now!

Sourcetrail project address

  • Github.com/CoatiSoftwa…

Refer to the link

  • www.sourcetrail.com/
  • Github.com/CoatiSoftwa…

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