Tool to visualise code flow (C/C++) [closed]

Question

Do you have any sugestions of tools to ease the task of understanding C/C++ code? We just inherited a large piece of software written by others and we need to quickly get up to speed on it. Any advice on tools that might simplify this task?

Answer 1

SourceInsight and Understand for C++ are the best tools you can get for c/c++ code analysis including flow charts.

Answer 2

I used Borland Together a while back and it did a decent job of generating models from code. I believe it will even generate sequence diagrams from code. Keep in mind if your code is a mess your model will be too. And as I recall it isn't cheap but sometimes you can catch a special.

Answer 3

Doxygen is very good at generating diagrams from code without applying markup, if you turn on the EXTRACT_ALL option. You need GraphViz installed to get diagrams generated with the HAVE_DOT setting. I find having it installed and leaving the DOT_PATH blank works fine on Windows but on OS/X keep having to point directly to the dot tool location.

There's an excellent Code Spelunking article in ACM Queue which talks more about using doxygen and DTrace.

Answer 4

Doxygen, the good thing about it is it will let you know hoe ugly/good is your code in terms of cyclic dependency of classes. So you will be forced to re-factor your code, though you may not like it :-)