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 Forums >>  Brainstorms - General  >>  Understanding Open Source code

Topic created on: August 23, 2006 05:01 CDT by 5aLIVE .

Hi,

I have downloaded some c++ open source code which I'd like to study to see how it all works.  This is a multiple file project, so on first inspection there is a lot of navigation between header file and code files.

Naturally, I searched a little using Google and found a few IDEs that claim to help with the anaylsis of unknown code.  Tools like Source Insight, Understand for C++, Source Publisher, UltraEdit and so on.

What tools do you guys use? (commercial or free) for Windows.

I'd like to ask what you guys recommend to help accomplish a quick and reliable analysis?  

This project may be complicated by the fact that I am learning C++ as I go along.  Do you consider producing UML diagrams will be a helpful aid to my understanding of how things work together?

I appreciate recommendations to help me get this project off to a productive start.  

One I know how it all works I hope to add my own code to meet my requirements.

Thanks for reading this.

  MohammadHosein     August 23, 2006 07:05.19 CDT
Understand for CPP is cool for small projects,
Sometimes ago i was a team member somewhere we finished a middle-scale project successfully thanks to Borland Together C++ edition reversing features. Certainly UML Diagrams will help you to have a better understanding of the whole system and inter-component communications

  dst     August 23, 2006 16:00.02 CDT
UltraEdit is a nice editor, but I think the other tools you mention are more suited for code analysis.

I always find it useful to debug a program, i.e. step through it, to understand it.

  ero     August 24, 2006 02:23.46 CDT
I think Doxygen might be a good tool. I've used it in similar cases, it's not restricted to C++ (it can also do C, Python, Java and more) and can build nice browseable graphs for the class relationships.

  pedram     August 24, 2006 14:09.23 CDT
Doxygen rocks, that's what I use. Other alternatives are cscope (free), codesurfer  (commercial) and Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 has nice cross-reference enumeration.

  5aLIVE   August 28, 2006 06:35.10 CDT
Thankyou for your thoughts gentlemen.  I've since had a play with Doxygen, Understand and Source Insight.

As you would expect, each have there own unique features and strengths, I probably continue evaluating them all until find the clear favourite.

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