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.
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.