What is a good tool to aid in browsing/following C code? [closed]

Answer 1

I use the Understand for C++. It's very handy tool to deal with large amounts of code. It also can calculate code statistics and draw call graph. Must have!

Answer 2

A language-sensitive source code search engine can be found at SD Source Code Search Engine. It can handle many languages at the same time. Searches can be performed for patterns in a specific langauge, or patterns across languages (such as "find identifiers involving TAX"). By being sensitive to langauge tokens, the number of false positives is reduced, saving time for the user. It understands C, C++, C#, COBOL, Java, ECMAScript, Java, XML, Verilog, VHDL, and a number of other languages.

Answer 3

I've had great success using doxygen. For best results (particularly when creating documentation for c++) install graphviz and enable in your doxygen configuration file.

This will automatically generate dependency maps and class diagrams that are linked to the rest of the html documentation.

Answer 4

ctags is very useful. There are two steps involved. First run the program ctags on all your source and include directories. This creates a file named 'tags' in the local directory. ctags *.c *.h would do fine if all your source is in a single directory. When you work with source in multiple directories, it can be worth running ctags in multiple locations. Then, within vi, with your cursor on any function, defined type or variable use ctl-] to go to the definition of that entity. Use etags if you're using emacs.

Answer 5

cscope. (wanted to mod up other scope post, but i don't have karma yet).

• global search and replace
• find all places a function is called
• find all places called by a function
• find files including this file.

really simple usage: $ cscope -R

if you don't know vi, then change your EDITOR and VIEWER environmental variables to your preferred editor.

Answer 6

Doxygen is wonderful. I've had to get across several legacy code bases that I was never involved in before, and it's been fantastic for that (even though the code bases were not documented using Doxygen format).