Sourcetrail

Sourcetrail was a FOSS source code explorer that provided interactive dependency graphs and support for multiple programming languages including C, C++, Java and Python.

History

The project was started by Eberhard Gräther after an internship at Google where he worked on Google Chrome, and noticed that he consumed a lot of time (1 month) to implement a simple feature that he expected to be done in 1–2 hours. This was his motivation to develop a tool that helps in understanding the consequences of source code modifications. The project started as a commercial project in 2016 under the name Coati. In November 2019, Sourcetrail was released as open-source software under version three of the GNU General Public License.

The project was discontinued in 2021.https://web.archive.org/web/20211115131149/https://www.sourcetrail.com/blog/discontinue_sourcetrail/ Blog post on discontinuing Sourcetrail.

Concept Most of a programmer's time is invested in reading the source code."Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write." "Moreover, research shows that developers spend about 57-70% of their time understanding existing code, i.e., program comprehension" Therefore, Sourcetrail was intended to help the developers to understand the source code and the relationship between different components. Sourcetrail builds a dependency graph after indexing the source code files and provides a graphical overview of the source code.

Sourcetrail

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