While browsing the EETimes website, I noticed an ad that said “Flowcharts from C/C++ code.” It sounded interesting, and so I clicked on it. It took me to the SGV Sarc website and I spent the last half hour reading what they have to say.
This company basically offers tools that can read your C or C++ code and produce flowcharts of your programs. The flowcharts make it easier to understand the original code, especially if you are unfamiliar with it.
There is a whole school of thought prescribing the use of graphical programming tools that generate code. But the industry has clearly preferred text-based programming approach. While this makes your code extremely portable across platforms, and frees you from the dependence on proprietary tools, it also adds the burden of having to understand and maintain code that is hard to read. So the SGV Sarc tool Crystal Flow seems to address this problem well. I haven’t used this tool yet, but looking at the demo, I can see how one can use this tool to gain a quick understanding of some existing code base before attempting to do any work with it.
This tool has definitely piqued my interest. I may be spending some time soon to try out their free trial version.
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