Sourcetrail promises to help software engineers explore, navigate & understand unknown source code quickly

Here’s an interesting tool for you. Meet Sourcetrail, a cross-platform source explorer for C/C++ and Java.

Sourcetrail promises to help software engineers explore, navigate and understand unknown source code quickly and thoroughly. It combines an interactive graph visualization, a concise code view and a powerful search engine that are built into an easy-to-use cross-platform developer tool.

Now that we made the necessary introductions, let’s have a look at what’s featured in the latest Sourcetrail release 2018.4.

Faster indexing  – Taking the users’ feedback on the slow indexing speed to heart, the team achieved quite an improvement with up to 66% speed-up, depending on your hardware of course.

Lower memory consumption – The new release also features lower memory consumption during indexing and project loading.

New tab bar – The user interaction and shortcuts are the same as you are used to from your web browser. With the only exception that tabs cannot be detached into separated windows yet. Open in New Tab context menu actions is also added to the graph and code view. Alternatively, the middle mouse button can be used for that as well.

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Type-use edges to template/generics argument type from parent context – Sourcetrail makes it possible to inspect how template/generics types are composed, by showing you all types that are used as template/generics argument. But sometimes it can be cumbersome to see which types really depend on which other types. With this new release we added type-use edges from the parent context to the type used as template/generic argument. That way it is easier to spot how types are used in your codebase when templates/generics are involved.

C/C++ – Updated to LLVM/Clang 7.0.0

Check out the changelog for the extensive list of changes and new features.

Getting started

Sourcetrail is free for non-commercial use and you can find all the available downloads here.

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