New GrammaTech code analysis tool works with millions of lines of code

Product

July 19, 2012

John McHale

Editorial Director

Military Embedded Systems

Engineers at GrammaTech designed a new tool for code analysis that includes a Google Earth-like zooming feature that enables users to zoom in on individual lines of code in systems that contain as much as 20 million lines of code.

Engineers at GrammaTech designed a new tool for code analysis that includes a Google Earth-like zooming feature that enables users to zoom in on individual lines of code in systems that contain as much as 20 million lines of code. The new CodeSonar visualization tool (which works with GrammaTech’s CodeSonar static analysis tool) enables developers to visualize data sets at different levels of abstraction. Designed for a customer program that contained 20 million lines of code, GrammaTech officials say there is no reason the tool cannot analyze larger amounts of code. Users can also overlay the CodeSonar defect analysis capability. GrammaTech designers originally based the tool on Google Earth, but found that model inefficient and then created their own visualization tool that still has the same “zooming” effect that you see with Google Earth. Users can actually scroll via the mouse all the way out so that the program is just a dot, then shoot all the way down to individual lines of code. CodeSonar visualization displays the program’s call graph, so it is organized according to the program module structure. Graph layouts can be changed in real time and present data in tree, circuit, map, cluster, radial, flow, and other layouts. With CodeSonar visualization, developers can begin at individual functions to gain insight from a bottom-up perspective, annotate nodes and edges with additional information, and overlay the visualization with data on defects and source-code metrics such as complexity. CodeSonar visualization runs through a standard Web client such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Chrome, or Firefox browsers.