A few years ago I set out to refactor some of my team's code that I wasn't particularly familiar with, but we wanted to modularize and re-use in more places. The primary file alone was 18k+ lines of Typescript that was a terrible mess of spaghetti. Most of it had been written in JavaScript but later converted haphazardly. I ended up writing myself a little app that used the Typescript compiler APIs to help me just explore all the many branches of the code and annotate how I would refactor different parts. It helped a bit, but I never got time to add some of the more intelligent features I wanted like finding every execution path between two points.
give depgraph a try - https://github.com/henryhale/depgraph - i'd like to learn about how i could improve it.
I gave it a try on my current codebase out of curiosity. Definitely useful. It worked well and fast, but it has a lot of duplicates that get rendered as exports in the NodeJS modules based codebase. I think it can sometimes be caused by me just being haphazard about re-exporting them, but other times I'm not sure.
Eg authenticatedMenu() appears 4 times in authenticatedMenu.js, only one of them is imported by 2 different files and 3 are just there alone. There's a single export in the file and a number of other files import it through an index.js that re-exports several files other files too.
In my case I think it'd help, if I could disable the duplicates as they don't really provide any useful information when exploring the codebase.
Also, if there was optionally a way to ignore the files that re-export functions/classes and collapse those paths, it'd make the graph a lot smaller and more easy to understand. Maybe it's already something that depgraph does, but the duplicates confuse things, so I'm not sure.
> I think it can sometimes be caused by me just being haphazard about re-exporting them, but other times I'm not sure.
I think so too. I guess that's how your project is structured and duplicates maybe inevitable.
The graph shows exactly how the project is organized. Right - "duplicates confuse things" - this would suggest eliminating "files that re-export functions/classes" or passing an option (-i) for ignoring specific paths would help. Otherwise, this issue is noted for further analysis.
Thanks for trying depgraph.