Re: Exploring a code base?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2020 20:26:16 +0700
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
> 
> Yeah, there exist many tools that attempt to take in the whole project
> and generate a complete call graph. In my experience, most of the
> time, for any project more complex than Hello World, the resulting
> graph is too messy to be helpful.
> 
> For one thing, I am not interested in all calls, only those through
> which a particular data type flows as an argument or [part of] the
> return value. This subgraph is smaller and simpler, and actually has a
> chance to embed into a plane without many edge intersections.

Maybe you could step back and describe in a bit more detail what kind
of workflow you are trying to support, and how that contributes to the
kind of code-base exploring job you have in mind.  I do this quite a
lot, and IME a combination of M-. and M-? (with the latter using the
back-end of ID Utils, if possible) is entirely adequate.  In
particular, I don't think I ever was in the need of some graph to
refactor a data type, I only needed to examine its uses.

Basically, I'm asking why having a flat list of all the users of a
data type, and reading the code of all of them, is not enough for this
kind of job?  What am I missing?