The GOlang Repository Explorer will splay out your program's internals for the world to see, exposing inconvenient truths and telling the story of your code.
This is currently POC/tech demo-quality software. Use at your own risk, if at all. That said, neither the program itself nor the accompanying scripts do anything particularly dangerous like delete files, so it should be perfectly safe when used as directed.
Clone this repo, then open a terminal in the project root and run
script/bootstrap followed by script/build. That should leave a new
executable at bin/gore.
The easiest way to test it out is to run this project on itself with bin/gore ., then paste the output into Webgraphviz to
visualize it.
Note that gore currently just spits its results to stdout, so if you'd like to
save them to a file then please use shell redirection like so: bin/gore . > gore.dot.
This is primarily a hack project for me to get to know Go in two ways:
- by actually writing a Go program
- by giving me a tool to explore a Go codebase in a way that makes sense to me.
The former is self-explanatory, so I'll describe the latter. When I'm approaching a new codebase, I often have a difficult time deciding which files to read and in which order. I end up with the same questions over and over again:
- which file has the main program logic?
- which files have commonly-used abstractions, types, utility functions, etc?
- if I wanted to read every function in implementation order, where would I start?
What I often want, or at least think I want, is a DAG showing all the source files in the project and how they relate to one another. That way, I can choose to start reading, say, a/the file that no other file requires (probably main or something). I can also see the project at a glance to get an idea of the high-level architecture.
GORE is my first attempt to implement such a tool.