| Sourcetrail | |
| Developer: | The Sourcetrail Development Team |
| Latest Release Version: | 2021.4.19 |
| Repo: | https://github.com/CoatiSoftware/Sourcetrail |
| License: | GNU General Public License v3.0 |
| Genre: | Software quality |
Sourcetrail was a FOSS source code explorer that provided interactive dependency graphs and support for multiple programming languages including C, C++, Java and Python.[1]
The project was started by Eberhard Gräther after an internship at Google where he worked on Google Chrome, and noticed that he consumed a lot of time (1 month) to implement a simple feature that he expected to be done in 1–2 hours. This was his motivation to develop a tool that helps in understanding the consequences of source code modifications.[2] The project started as a commercial project in 2016 under the name Coati.[3] In November 2019, Sourcetrail was released as open-source software under version three of the GNU General Public License.[4]
The project was discontinued in 2021.[5]
Most of a programmer's time is invested in reading the source code. Therefore, Sourcetrail is intended to help the developers to understand the source code and the relationship between different components. Sourcetrail builds a dependency graph after indexing the source code files and provides a graphical overview of the source code.
It is built in an extendable way, so it could be extended to support more programming languages.