[PLUG] Re: wow. learned something new!

Jason R. Martin nsxfreddy at gmail.com
Mon Mar 27 04:50:02 UTC 2006


On 26 Mar 2006 18:08:23 -0800, Russell Senior <seniorr at aracnet.com> wrote:
> >>>>> "Randal" == Randal L Schwartz <merlyn at stonehenge.com> writes:
>
> >>>>> "Russell" == Russell Senior <seniorr at aracnet.com> writes:
> Russell> I am not a kernel hacker, so when reading kernel code I've
> Russell> always been a bit curious about struct list_head, the generic
> Russell> doubly linked list in the kernel.  [...]
>
> Randal> And the wonderful thing is that with this being open source,
> Randal> you can *see* how it works, and *how* it is used, in a large
> Randal> enterprise-ready system, and all of us become better
> Randal> programmers for it. [...]
>
> Randal> Having good examples of large systems is a great way to see
> Randal> what works in practice, not just theory.
>
> Part of my wonderings are, no doubt, due to not keeping up on more
> recent C standardization or even gcc extentions (as this was) for that
> matter.  My primary C reference is still K&R and/or Harbison&Steele.
> So, one question might be, what is a currently germane C reference?
>
> Another topical question for me is: what are good tools for exploring
> existing code?  Particularly in figuring out the overall structure of
> a project.  I am thinking of a call tree (this function calls these
> other functions) kind of thing.  Or other similar tools that are
> useful, beyond, say, /usr/bin/less.  What do people find useful?

ctags and vi/emacs, or if you're feeling more browserish, LXR
(http://lxr.linux.no/).

Source Insight is really nice, but it isn't open-source (or cheap).

Jason



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