Sourcetrail was a FOSS source code explorer that provided interactive dependency graphs and support for multiple programming languages including C, C++, Java and Python.[1]

Sourcetrail
Developer(s)The Sourcetrail Development Team
Stable release
2021.4.19
Repositoryhttps://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail
Operating systemMultiplatform
TypeSoftware quality
LicenseGNU General Public License v3.0

History edit

The project was started by Eberhard Gräther after an internship at Google where he worked on Google Chrome, and noticed that he consumed a lot of time (1 month) to implement a simple feature that he expected to be done in 1–2 hours. This was his motivation to develop a tool that helps in understanding the consequences of source code modifications.[2] The project started as a commercial project in 2016 under the name Coati.[3] In November 2019, Sourcetrail was released as open-source software under version three of the GNU General Public License.[4]

The project was discontinued in 2021.[5]

Concept edit

Most of a programmer's time is invested in reading the source code.[citation needed] Therefore, Sourcetrail is intended to help the developers to understand the source code and the relationship between different components. Sourcetrail builds a dependency graph after indexing the source code files and provides a graphical overview of the source code.

It is built in an extendable way, so it could be extended to support more programming languages.

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ Krill, Paul (November 21, 2019). "Sourcetrail code navigator now free open source". InfoWorld.
  2. ^ "Why working on Chrome made me develop a tool for reading source code". 10 January 2017.
  3. ^ "Coati Release 0.6". Sourcetrail Developer Blog.
  4. ^ "Sourcetrail is now free and open-source software". Sourcetrail Developer Blog.
  5. ^ https://web.archive.org/web/20211115131149/https://www.sourcetrail.com/blog/discontinue_sourcetrail/ Blog post on discontinuing Sourcetrail.

External links edit