"Silent Bob", by example, is actually, a combination of three tools, which leaded to its creation: ctags, cscope, ctree. First I shall describe their operation and problems, and then what "Bob" does and in what it differs.

1. ctags

   If you don't know what it does: It simply creates special file named tags (or ctags), which stores information about some source files. Mostly it is used to browse large source projects like: OS kernels, sendmail, apache and other big projects. This file contains "Addresses" of all functions, structures, macros, etc. "Address" means file name + string number (or regular expression, using which an appropriate string can be located). The tags file, in Vim for example, can be used to evaluate ":tag " to make a quick jump to the tag. Also ctags allows to extract other "goodies" from files - simply to find out more about their contents.

2. csope

   Also a very useful program. It doesn't create a file described above, but can perform lookups and has some additional features. It has:

   1. An interface for "comfortable" search.
   2. Trace which of the called functions were called and whom do they call ("lower" layer)
   3. Trace who called certain functions ("upper" layer)
   And some other feature(s), which I have never used...

3. ctree

   In theory, it should have shown all of the above information and several layers "lower". But in practice, I couldn't make it work.

• ctags problems :
  For "tags" file creation regular expressions are used, which allows to add other languages, but places a substantial limits:
  1. Quality of received information is quite low.
  2. Information, which we receive, in "interactive" mode is not full enough.
  3. Support for C++ is present, but not quite good.
• cscope problems :
  Actually, all ctags problems, plus:
  1. Base, which actually doesn't needed anybody, but "weights" 150 Mbytes (for Linux 2.6.14 for example).
  2. Quality of "interactivity" is not good enough.
  3. No Support for C++. This is BAD, because problems this kind of software is said to solve depend on different libraries, including Qt3/GTK+, which are C++.

In SilentBob these problems are absent. The application uses a custom preprocessor (written by me) rather than the regexps.

Main ideas of SilentBob

The preprocessor mentioned above is called "THE_TT" and placed in appropriate file.
Actually it's operation is quite simple: it removes all "extras" from C/C++ source. It removes/minimizes all variants of C code notations, removes all extra space symbols and comments, adds additional spaces where it's necessary (for example, before brackets). THE_TT allows to take some part of code and exactly (about 99%) tell you what is it, using minimum of checks. All this works quite fast (for example, 1.6 GHz processor, 256 Mb of RAM - works excellent), which allows to do many interesting things. As far as I know, such kind of code usually is written only to compilers and isn't used for other things, what, as for my view, isn't good enough.

Next SilentBob's level - "t_op", "what_is_this" and alike functions. First of them simply allows to enumerate all "operators" of source code, second - checks, what kind of operator do we met. Actually, "what_is_this" isn't quite enough for all, so some additional functions exists... Now, THE_TT and t_op are two separate parts of program. In future I plan to unite them...

It took me about one month to develop current version (1.0-rc1) and two months for testing, finding out bugs, etc.

LIFE STORY

SilentBob was written one dark night when one Siberian fellow tried to understand how sys_poll system call works. After some time of digging the sources and several tanks of drunk beer, this fellow realized that abilities of Gvim solely simply do not quite suffice. Some tricks were made - they helped a little, but this wasn't the solution.
Then some other popular tools were tried. After several tries the fellow understood that he received the access to function he needs. But only one function. If you take into account the fact such calls, let's say, do not appear only once in a program - you can imagine this fellow's indignation.

Download...

sf.net project : link

© Oleg Puchinin 2006-2007
contact: graycardinalster at gmail dot com