[SGVLUG] C++ code comprehension tools

[nopbin at gmail.com]

Every few years I look around and am usually left wanting.  Like Rod, most
often I too come around to using doxygen with all the options enabled,
which I find quite useful, and sometimes exuberant ctags which I find
rather primitive.

I have also had good experiences using Visual Studio.  I don't recall if it
was stand along or had some plug-ins but the one I used had good code
navigation, quick lookup, cross referencing and search capability assuming
you pretty much load the whole code base as a project.  You might have to
evaluate whether differences between gcc and msvc c++ dialects are going to
make it difficult to get VS to parse the code. I fear it will require
massaging.

If not already, very soon a preview release of Jetbrain's Visual Studio
plugin resharper for C++ should be available. Resharper is an excellent
tool that also offers quite a lot of code navigation and exploration
features. http://blogs.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2013/06/resharper-to-support-c/
Keep an eye on Jetbrains as they have separately announced that a C++
editor like IntelliJ is in the works but I have not heard anything about a
release date.

For what it is worth I recall trying eclipse with CDT some time back and
found it better than ctags but still too limited -- though it has been
under ongoing development and may have improved.
http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/

If you settle on a solution that works well for you, please share.











On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 10:28 AM, Rod Morison <rod at morison.biz> wrote:

> Been there, done that a few times...
>
> http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/ <http://www.stack.nl/%
> 7Edimitri/doxygen/> isn't bad for the $s (== 0)
>
> If you have emacs trained fingers, etags or http://www.gnu.org/software/
> emacs/manual/html_node/ebrowse/index.html#Top can help.
>
>
>
> On 11/22/2013 10:20 AM, Braddock wrote:
>
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>> I am currently digging into a 140k line sophisticated C++ Linux
>> application.  I am learning my way around the code base, and vim and
>> cscope just do not cut it for finding references and call sites in
>> advanced C++.
>>
>> I want a tool that lets me look at entity references, find method
>> definitions, graphs class diagrams, etc.
>>
>> "Understand" by scitools is exactly what I want, and even runs on
>> Linux, but it is $1,000 per seat.  I am burning through my two week
>> trial, but am hesitant to ask my client to lay out that much money.
>>
>> Does anyone have any experience with open source (or lower cost) code
>> analysis alternatives that won't be a waste of my time when dealing
>> with complex C++ code?  Perferably native Linux but I'm not beneath
>> running them in a Windows 8 VM.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Braddock
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