I need a tool that I can use to get a better understanding of a large C
project. I'd like to be able to see the relationship between the various C
modules and what calls what, most used functions, what headers are used, etc.
I've searched here and Google but all the source code analysis tools seem to give
you the number of lines of code and other metrics that I'm not interested in. I just
want to get a high level view of how things are structured and interconnected before jumping into the code.
Does anything like this exist?
I've looked at these but they do not seem to do what I want: Source Code Tools
Since posting this I've tried Doxygen and it seems to give me some of what I need. Any others?
Try GNU cflow, that will analyze the call tree of the functions - you will nicely see the call hierarchy of the functions. Or browse the code with Eclipse.
Source Navigator may be helpful for some things (I used it to see call trees). See screenshots.
cxref builds annotated source code cross reference that's easy to view and navigate (I used to create HTML reference of some of my code). See cxref's output on its own source code here. Can be used to document the code.
It is not OSS, but the tool CppDepend can certainly help when it comes to understand a large legacy application written in C or C++.
Related
I am writing a program in Java for a university project, part of the write up report states:
'You must provide listings for your program'
Can anyone provide me with some clarification on what is meant by this?
I have looked high and wide online but nothing i've come across has helped clear this up for me. I found a definition 'With computer programming, a program listing is the complete listing of a computer program, source code, and all files that make up the software program', but his hasn't helped with my understanding of what is being asked in the report.
Should I be providing screen-grabs of my code? Or a screen-grab of the folder with all related files?
Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
A listing of your program used to mean the code of your program rendered into printed form; i.e. on paper. These days, it could also mean that the source code is formatted and included as a PDF file, or a Word document or something else.
Should I be providing screen-grabs of my code?
It is unclear if that is what your lecturer wants. I don't expect so, because screenshots are harder to read than formatted text.
Or a screen-grab of the folder with all related files?
That is highly unlikely, IMO. If that is what your lecturer wanted they would have said "directory listing" not "listings for your program". (And that would be useless for assessment purposes.)
But my advice is to ask your lecturer if you are at all unclear what is required of you.
And if your lecturer is unwilling to explain, just do what you think is correct.
What you find is correct, you need to give source code and any other resources needed to build and run the softaware.
One options could be to :
- pack my project with some build manager (maven, gradle, etc)
- push it to some repository (like github) with a README.md for building and running
- give the github project reference.
If you prefer not to make public the code, just pack it and send an archive with the maven project.
They are looking for a nice printed output of your source code. In olden days (pre 2K) compilers would produce a output, well formatted (often with a list of symbols and line number to aid in understanding the code.
I am using a command line tool (ng-xi18n) to extract the i18n strings from an angular 2 app I wrote. The output of this command is a messages.xlf file. Coming from a .po background, and being not familiar with .xlf, I assumed that this file is the equivalent to the .pot file (correct me if I am wrong).
I then assumed that if I want to translate my app, I had to cp messages.xlf messages.de.xlf to have a copy (messages.de.xlf) of the template file (messages.xlf) where I can translate each message into German (hence the .de.xlf).
After translating some dummy texts and running the app, I saw that it worked as expected, so I quit translating and continued developing the app. After some time, I added more i18n strings, and eventually thought that I had to update my template. And this is where things got hardly maintainable. I updated the template messages.xlf file, and quickly was wondering how I could update the new strings to my already translated messages.de.xlf file without loosing my progress.
When I was developing using .po files, this was no problem thanks to good tools like poEdit, but I didn't find anything comparable for .xlf. After trying some tools, I thought that the best choice would be Lokalize, but I didn't find a possibility to merge the template file to already translated (but outdated) files either.
Up to now, this was rather an essay than a question, so here's a quick summary:
Is the workflow of dealing with .xlf files really comparable to .po as I initially thought (described above), or is it completely different?
How am I suppose to update my already translated files?
What are the best practices dealing with .xlf files?
What are proof of concept tools to work with .xlf?
Sidenotes:
The Lokalize handbook was not helpful at all. I see a lot of functions that sound promising, like:
"File" > "Update file from template". I did not find anything in the handbook to explain this function. If I click on this, nothing happens.
"Sync" > "Open file for sync/merge". This seems to be a function to merge two similar files (by multiple translators) rather than a tool to update the translation file from a template. Even though there is a tooltip in Lokalize's primary sync tab, notifying me about "x unmatched entries", I just couldn't find anything to append those unmatched entries to my .de.xlf file.
[Update] Turns out, I had similar issues as in this question. After downgrading my version of Lokalize to the suggested one, many issues (including the ones mentioned in the question) disappeared. However, now the "Update file from template" option is greyed out, and I don't know why.
I also tried OmegaT, which does not work at all on my platform (Ubuntu 16.04).
[Update] Virtaal works great for merging new strings from a template, but the UI in general is very poorly designed...
Googling did not help, as every hit seems to be related to XCode or something.
Thanks for any help in advance, I really appreciate it
I wrote a small npm command line tool called xliffmerge.
In principle it does the same, that Roland Oldengarm does with his gulp tasks described in his blog article.
It is free and you can have a look at it at https://github.com/martinroob/ngx-i18nsupport#readme
The best workflow automation solution I have seen described so far is from Roland Oldengarm's blog entry "Angular 2: Automated i18n workflow using gulp". To summarize, in a few dozen lines of Gulp code he created the tooling to handle some of the challenges you faced. Specifically it runs ng-xi18n to extract the messages; creates an English translation with sources copied to targets; updates existing translations by adding new trans-units, keeping existing ones, and removing missing ones; and then exposes all xlf files as TypeScript string constants. These last strings can then be imported to supply the bootstrapModule with its translation provider options.
Caveat: I have not used this exact solution (and code) myself, but I was able to expose generated xlf as TypeScript strings and use them in an app in a manner similar to what he described. As for maintaining translations, I have leveraged IntelliJ IDEA (WebStorm) file comparison features and Counterparts Lite (for Mac) for that. My own efforts are still in early stages but are working end to end for an application that is in active development.
Official Angular docs are now updated for Internationalization (i18n) at https://angular.io/docs/ts/latest/cookbook/i18n.html including a section specifically for creating a translation source file with the ng-xi18n tool.
I have a custom XML format that links to Java resources. For the sake of simplicity let's assume my XML file would look like this:
<root>
<java-class>my.fully.qualified.class.name</java-class>
</root>
Eventually my references will be somewhat more complicated. It will not contain the fully qualified class name directly and I will need some logic to resolve the correct class, but I want to keep the example as simple as possible here.
Now I want it to be possible to Strg+Click on the element's text and want IntelliJ to carry me to the .java file, just like it is possible in Spring-XML files. In the IDEA Plugin Development FAQ there is a link called "How do I add custom references to Java elements in XML files?" which so much sounds like exactly what I need. Unfortunately it links to a discussion where someone is more or less done implementing something like this, having some minor problems. Nevertheless I understood that I probably need to write an implementation of the interface com.intellij.psi.PsiReference. Googling for "PsiReference" and "IntelliJ" or "IDEA" unfortunately did not bring up any tutorials on how to use it, but I found the class XmlValueReference which sounds useful. Yet again googling for "XmlValueReference" did not turn up anything useful on how to use the class. At least the PSI Cookbook tells me that I can find the Java class by using JavaPsiFacade.findClass(). I'd be thankful for any tutorials, hints and the like, that tell the correct usage.
The above linked discussion mentions that I need to call registry.registerReferenceProvider(XmlTag.class, provider) in order to register my provider once I eventually managed to implement it, but of which type is "registry" and where do I get it from?
First of all, here's a nice tutorial that came up a few days ago, which explains the basics of IntelliJ plugin development (you should take a look at the section Reference Contributor).
You will likely have to define your own PsiReferenceContributor, which will be referenced in your plugin.xml like this:
<psi.referenceContributor implementation="com.yourplugin.YourReferenceContributor"/>
In your reference contributor, there's a method registerReferenceProviders(PsiReferenceRegistrar) where you will be able to call registry.registerReferenceProvider(XmlTag.class, provider).
Finally, in your instance of PsiReferenceProvider, you will have to test the tag name to filter out tags which don't contain class references, then find the right Java class using JavaPsiFacade.findClass().
From my experience, the best place to get help regarding IntelliJ plugin development is JetBrains' forums.
If you've used javadoc and then come to doxygen, you may know what I mean when I say I miss the hierarchical (frame-based) view that made jumping from class to class and method to method easy. (For those who haven't seen it, imagine a tree-navigator in an IDE or over a filesystem).
How can I get Doxygen to include a navigation tree, if it's even possible?
A similar question was asked in October, but that was just about stylesheet alternatives and only one turned up. I think I'm looking for something more major.
Note that all you need to do to get the tree on the left in Quinn's example is setting GENERATE_TREEVIEW to YES in the config file.
At a basic level, Doxygen output is what it is, and I don't think there's "a better way to view" static HTML content. I think what you want is for Doxygen to produce HTML output that is more similar to Javadoc, which has both pros and cons. (The biggest drawback is that it's unlikely to happen, due to the effort involved and the broad user base.)
I manage a project that is documented using Doxygen, and I'm not sure to what degree my config uses the Doxygen defaults, but I get a sections in the left frame for a flat class list and a class hierarchy. Also, since I have diagrams enabled, the Graphical Class Hierarchy is a fairly quick way to jump to where I want. I haven't delved into Doxygen modules, so I don't have any experience with whether that might segment things similar to how Javadoc does with packages.
What is a tool or technique that can be used to perform spell checks upon a whole source code base and its associated resource files?
The spell check should be source code aware meaning that it would stick to checking string literals in the code and not the code itself. Bonus points if the spell checker understands common resource file formats, for example text files containing name-value pairs (only check the values). Super-bonus points if you can tell it which parts of an XML DTD or Schema should be checked and which should be ignored.
Many IDEs can do this for the file you are currently working with. The difference in what I am looking for is something that can operate upon a whole source code base at once.
Something like a Findbugs or PMD type tool for mis-spellings would be ideal.
As you mentioned, many IDEs have this functionality already, and one such IDE is Eclipse. However, unlike many other IDEs Eclipse is:
A) open source
B) designed to be programmable
For instance, here's an article on using Eclipse's code formatting functionality from the command line:
http://www.peterfriese.de/formatting-your-code-using-the-eclipse-code-formatter/
In theory, you should be able to do something similar with it's spell-checking mechanism. I know this isn't exactly what you're looking for, and if there is a program for doing spell-checking in code then obviously that'd be better, but if not then Eclipse may be the next best thing.
This seems little old but seems to do a good job
Source Code Spell Checker