The SourceGraph program
Pages 151 - 154
Abstract
As software has increased in size and complexity, a range of tools has been developed to assist programmers in analysing the structure of their code. One of the key concepts used for such analysis is the concept of a call graph, which is used to represent which entities in a code base call other entities. However, most tools which use call graphs are limited to either visualisation for documentation purposes (such as Doxygen) or for dynamic analysis to find areas to optimise in the software using profiling tools such as gprof.
SourceGraph is a new tool which takes a different approach to software analysis using call graphs, for projects written in Haskell. It creates a static call graph directly from the source code and then uses it to perform static analysis using graph-theoretic techniques with the aim of helping the programmer understand how the different parts of their program interact with each other. Whilst still a work in progress, it can already be used to find possible problems in the code base such as unreachable areas and cycles or cliques in the function calls as well as other useful information. SourceGraph thus provides programmers not only with various ways of visualising their software, but helps them to understand what their code is doing and how to improve it.
References
[1]
T. Ball and S.G. Eick. Software visualization in the large. Computer, 29(4):33--43, 1996. ISSN 0018-9162
[2]
C. Biemann. Chinese Whispers -- an Efficient Graph Clustering Algorithm and its Application to Natural Language Processing Problems. In Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL-06 Workshop on Textgraphs-06, New York, USA, 2006.
[3]
N. Broberg. haskell-src-exts: Manipulating Haskell source: abstract syntax, lexer, parser, and pretty-printer. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/haskell-src-exts
[4]
G. Gan, C. Ma, and J. Wu. Data Clustering: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications. ASA-SIAM Series on Statistics and Applied Probability. SIAM, 2007. ISBN 0898716233
[5]
E.R. Gansner and S.C. North. An Open Graph Visualization System and Its Applications. Software -- Practice and Experience, 30:1203--1233, 1999. http://graphviz.org
[6]
T. Hallgren, J. Hook, M.P. Jones, and R.B. Kieburtz. An overview of the programatica toolset. In High Confidence Software and Systems Conference, HCSS04, 2004.
[7]
B. Huber. Language.C -- a C99 library for Haskell. http://www.sivity.net/projects/language.c
[8]
I. Jones. The Haskell Cabal: a common architecture for building applications and libraries. In M. van Eekelen, editor, 6th Symposium on Trends in Functional Programming, pages 340--354, 2005.
[9]
I.L. Miljenovic. Graph theoretic analysis of relationships within discrete data. Mathematics honours thesis, University of Queensland, November 2008.
[10]
G. Narayan, K. Gopinath, and V. Sridhar. Structure and interpretation of computer programs. In Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering, 2008. TASE '08. 2nd IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on, pages 73--80, June 2008.
[11]
S. Peyton Jones, L. Augustsson, D. Barton, B. Boutel, W.B.J. Fasel, K. Hammond, R. Hinze, P. Hudak, J. Hughes, T. Johnsson, M. Jones, J. Launchbury, E. Meijer, J. Peterson, A. Reid, C. Runciman, and P. Wadler. The Haskell 98 language and libraries: The revised report. Journal of Functional Programming, 13(1):0--255, Jan 2003. Also available at http://www.haskell.org/definition/ and through Cambridge Press.
[12]
S. Peyton Jones et al. GHC Language Features. http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/ghc-language-features.html
[13]
S.L. Peyton Jones, C.V. Hall, K. Hammond, W. Partain, and P. Wadler. The Glasgow Haskell compiler: a technical overview. In Proc. UK Joint Framework for Information Technology (JFIT) Technical Conference, 1993. http://haskell.org/ghc/.
[14]
N.F. Rodrigues and L.S. Barbosa. Component identification through program slicing. In Proc. of Formal Aspects of Component Software (FACS 2005). Elsevier ENTCS, pages 291--304. Elsevier, 2005.
[15]
B. Ryder. Constructing the call graph of a program. Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, SE-5(3):216--226, May 1979. ISSN 0098-5589
[16]
P. Wadler and S. Blott. How to make ad-hoc polymorphism less ad hoc. In POPL '89: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, pages 60--76, New York, NY, USA, 1989. ACM. ISBN 0-89791-294-2
Recommendations
CP-Miner: Finding Copy-Paste and Related Bugs in Large-Scale Software Code
Recent studies have shown that large software suites contain significant amounts of replicated code. It is assumed that some of this replication is due to copy-and-paste activity and that a significant proportion of bugs in operating systems are due to ...
Extremal cardinalities for identifying and locating-dominating codes in graphs
Consider a connected undirected graph G=(V,E), a subset of vertices C@?V, and an integer r>=1; for any vertex v@?V, let B"r(v) denote the ball of radius r centred at v, i.e., the set of all vertices linked to v by a path of at most r edges. If for all ...
Comparing call graphs
PASTE '07: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT workshop on Program analysis for software tools and engineeringComparing program analysis results from different static and dynamic analysis tools is difficult and therefore too rare, especially when it comes to qualitative comparison. Analysis results can be strongly affected by specific details of programs being ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
January 2010
168 pages
Copyright © 2010 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 18 January 2010
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Demonstration
Conference
PEPM '10
Sponsor:
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 66 of 120 submissions, 55%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 188Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)6
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 10 Aug 2024
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Get Access
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in