[Haskell-cafe] Re: Call Graph Tool?

[Josef Svenningsson]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 12:39 PM, Claus Reinke <claus.reinke at talk21.com> wrote:
>>> Assuming I get it included, is there any features in particular you'd
>>> want to
>>> see in there?  Note that if I do have it produce visualisations, they'll
>>> be
>>> static images as part of an analysis report rather than being
>>> interactive.
>>
>> I'd like the ability to show individual module dependencies, and then
>> to collapse modules in one package to just the package, so I could
>> "zoom out" and see how the packages relate to each other.  By
>> "package" here I mean the "A" in "A.B, A.C, etc."
>>
>> It seems like it would be fairly simple to use Language.Haskell.Parse
>> to turn a set of modules into a graph, and then something to massage
>> that and give it to dot.
>
> If you wanted to go down that route, try using 'ghc --make -v2'
> and translate that dependency graph to dot.
>
Yep, this is a pretty easy route and there is already a tool for doing
the translation: ocamldot. Don't be fooled by the name, it works on
Makefile's dependency information and in particular works well with
the output from ghc. Back in the days (like six years ago) I used it
on ghc itself. I also extended it so that different directories were
grouped together inside a box to get a better feel for the intended
structure of the program. ocamldot can be found here:
http://www.research.att.com/~trevor/ocamldot/

I should add that I didn't find the information the least bit helpful
so my general recommendation is to try to find some other method to
help understanding code.

All the best,

Josef