Welcome to the first "Codevis Weekly Update"

What is Codevis?

Codevis is a tool to help developers manage large codebases, sponsored by Bloomberg, developed by Codethink and hosted on the KDE Infrastructure, with all that, completely opensource with a permissive license. Codevis uses a mix of technologies to do what it does, mainly LLVM and Clang to do the heavy lifting of understanding C++ Codebases, Qt for Callback management (in the form of Signal/Slots), KDE Frameworks libraries for the desktop application, and pure Qt for the CLI application. The database layer is written with Soci , the same database layer used in CERN, targeting sqlite3.

But How does it work?

Codevis analyzes all the visible source code from your project and creates a graph database (using a relational database) in a way that the analyst can load and interpret information from the codebase without loading the codebase. The graph-database is comprehensive, and has all the information we think it's important, and also a lot of information that's good to have, with a bunch of information because why not. Since something that's not important for me could be really important for a company with billions of lines of code.

It just generates visualization?

No. Codevis also allows you to draw your software architecture and generate ready-to-compile c++ code from it. Think of this as a possibility to have C++ templates for complex projects tha are also visually documented. You can create libraries, classes, structures, connect them quickly on a dirty mockup during a meeting, and the output could be 60 c++ files on disk with all the classes, folder-hierarchy and CMake ready to compile.

This will not add any method or implement anything, but just the creation of the C++ files and CMake scripts from a small architecture meeting is pretty interesting in my point of view.

Yeah, but isn't UML alreday that?

No. UML is quite more complex and harder to use for large scale visualization, and the UML code generation doesn't really takes buildability in mind. You can't generate an entire project from a UML definition.

You say that it's a large scale, but my proejct is small. it will also help me?

Codevis will analyze everything, every single include that you use (even if it's not from your project), helping you decide the best usage for libraries and visualizing the graph with different graph algorithms - making sure that the physical software layout is organized (not just the logical architecture).

Improve it with Plugins

We support C++ and Python plugins so you can implement things that might be important for your corporation (and by corporation I mean Gnome, KDE, RedHat, Collabora, etc) and integrate the software in ways that the developers didn't think of.

CI integration?

Imagine that you need to make sure the architecture of the software is stable. Architecture is not something that is easy to do unittests for. it can also be a complex architecture so it's hard to see if all my new header and source files are implementing (or correctly integrating) into new architecture.

with Codevis you can use the cli tools and extract the code information on a CI step, load the database and run a plugin that checks if the whole architecture of the system is correct, based on heuristics.

Is everything you said here production ready?

No. This is also an appeal for help. we are developing and we have almost everything here running correcty, some parts are missing, specially, people using and testing is missing. We appreciate if people download, compile, try.