Playing around with the FOSS game Cataclysm DDA, I felt compelled to parse and connect the CPP and JSON to see relationships and complexity. It’s the first time I’ve really felt motivated to do so. I’m just trying to wrap my head around how some features are implemented like z-levels, mining tools and various actions; simple stuff really. I find it challenging to parse something quite this large, so I started scripting a way to track down objects across the code base to see what is defined in JSON and what is hard coded. Normal? Obvious? FOSS alternatives to do this? I’m basically chaining a bunch of grep commands to print pretty trees with bat.
Even better: do a git history of certain files to get a broad sense of history and understand it’s evolution.
I highly advise this practice for familiarizing yourself with parts of a codebase you may otherwise not know anything about. Interesting commits you should git show.
Though combining this with scripting would also be interesting. 🤔
I usually just use VS Code to do full-text searches, and write down notes in a note taking app. That, and browse the documentation.
The code is my bible, the grep is my friend.
That and breakpoints.
This is a really neat idea. I’m frequently put off by large highly distributed (among files and dependencies) codebases with no obvious entry point. I wanted to make some changes to GNU’s mailutils and the code felt genuinely incomprehensible (BSD’s implementation of mail was a bit easier).
Perhaps another approach is to parse ptrace.
To grep is to grok.
I have a grepconf alias for a find-grep loop on my nixos config that comes in handy. Treesitter can be a godsend too.
