Exploring a code base?

[Yuri Khan]

Hello list,

often, when working on a project, I encounter the following need:

* I want to refactor a data structure. It has a unique name, let’s say
Foo, so I ‘M-x grep RET git grep Foo RET’. This gives me a Grep buffer
where I can inspect each place where that type is used explicitly.

* I find that I have a function, let’s call it make_foo, that returns
an instance of that type. There is also a consume_foo that accepts an
argument of that type. I now want to inspect all usages of those
because my refactoring may affect them. So I put point on make_foo and
invoke ‘xref-find-references’.

* This leads to more functions that return Foo. I may want to inspect
each of those recursively.

Basically what I’m doing is traversal of a graph, where nodes are type
and function definitions, and edges are relationships such as
“function <calls> function”, “function <accepts> type”, “function
<returns> type”, “type <derives from> type”, “type <aggregates> type”,
etc.

When the change I’m doing is not very invasive, the affected subgraph
fits completely in my head. However, when it doesn’t, I find myself
having to record my traversal state. I create an Org buffer and
manually maintain a queue of nodes, marking those I haven’t yet
visited with TODO and those I have with DONE. Then I pick the first
TODO, grep or xref-find-references on it, add any relevant nodes to
the queue, make the necessary changes in the code, and mark the node
DONE. Repeat until no TODO.

This is rather tedious. It feels like there should exist a better way,
maybe with a visualization of the graph structure.

What do you use to explore and map a code base and perform extensive
changes on it?