Extraction and visualization of call dependencies for large C/C++ code bases: A comparative study

Abstract

Investigating program dependencies such as function calls is challenging for very large systems. We present here an integrated pipeline for extraction and visualization of call-and-hierarchy graphs for C/C++ programs. We present several adaptions and enhancements of a recent visualization method for large call graphs and compare its effectiveness with classical node-link diagrams. Examples are given on large real-world code bases such as bison, Mozilla and oink.