reading-source-code

Source Code Analysis - what do you do?

Situation: I have some source code, and I'm boning up on what happens. Who calls what, what goes where, etc, etc. (There is minimal documentation/comments, so I have to work it out myself). Now, my usual solution is to fire up a splitscreen text editor and stare at the code until I understand it, or maybe print it and write all over it ...

I want to read the source code of a real compiler. Suggestions on which & how? Any experiences to share?

In order to continue my dive into reading real code, I'd like to read and understand the source code of an actual in-use compiler. Is there one that you think is particularly well-written, elegant, and perhaps, still relatively small? Any suggestions? Any experiences? Resolution: I've decided to read the Lua source code. I've been bookm...

Generic source code browser for Windows and Linux

Hi, I am looking for a generic source code browser for Windows and Linux. The languages I use are limited to C/C++, Python and Perl. This tool must be able to show a view of classes/methods/functions in a tab or some similar user interface. It would be great if it could have equivalents of the VS "Go to declaration/definition" as well...

What books help one to learn to read code?

Lion's Commentary on Unix Sixth Edition with Source Code is a wonderful book to learn how to read code. Reading code is important -- how does one learn how to write excellent code without having read excellent code? But, sadly, while great writers, of fiction and non-fiction, all spend a great deal of time reading stuff, we, programmers...

How to analyze a project

I've been wanting to help out with an open source project for some time now. I want to do this for two main reasons. I am a strong supporter of foss and I want to gain experience. I've struggled to find a project that I thought I would want to help with. There are many I would like to help with, but they are far to complex for what I...

How to begin reading a huge amount of source code?

I'm interested in a specific Java-based project and want to understand how it really works. My main problem is that there are different versions of documentation which are inconsistent. The source code is mainly not commented and has nearly 150 kLOC (according to sloccount). So I have not idea where I should start. What would you recomme...

Where can we get explanations of the code of open source projects

Apart from inline code comments and the discussion forums of the respective open source projects, can anybody point me a single place where I can get the explanation of the code of open source projects, Is there any wikipedia thats dedicated for this where we can find user/community contributed explanations for the codes. ...