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Richard Fabian's avatar

Graphs in the xy plane tend to be called plots by mathematics people. Just, FYI.

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Nat Bennett's avatar

When you draw out call graphs, do you do that based on reading the code and working through the dependency graph? Or do you have another technique?

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Ben Christel's avatar

Yeah, I could have gone into more detail about this. Maybe in a future post. The summary is:

First, I identify the root function of the section of code I care about. Then I write down the names of the functions that are called from there. Then I repeat the process, recursively, for each function whose name I wrote down.

Once I have this written-out tree of function names, I'm ready to draw the graph. Though often, the tree of names gives me a good enough sense of the code that I stop there.

If I'm using a JetBrains editor like IntelliJ, there's a built in feature that does the function-listing step pretty well, and automatically: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/viewing-structure-and-hierarchy-of-the-source-code.html

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