Comments on: Generating call graphs for understanding and refactoring python code

By: Ashish yadav

Ashish yadav — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:51:30 +0000

Really saved me a lot of time, thanks a ton. .-= Ashish yadav´s last undefined ..If you register your site for free at =-.

By: Ernie

Ernie — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 09:29:19 +0000

Very cool and was very impressed by Python’s power. But I was coding in Version 2.5.2 and your call graph service generated an error on modern Python
ternary if construction. Hope you can update your 2.3.5 server or I will rewrite my own code not to use the modern constructs.
You make feel so happy I am using Python.

By: lbolla

lbolla — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:57:32 +0000

I’ve been working on a very similar project recently.
It is freely available from pypi!
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/py2dot

let me know your thoughts!

lbollas last blog post..Products.kupu 1.4.12.1

By: prashanthellina

prashanthellina — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:25:57 +0000

Mike, that’s great. Can you share the code?

By: mike

mike — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:52:23 +0000

I’ve extended the script to handle “methods”, in that it will recognize the invocation of name.attribute as a function call. It works properly for self in a class (unless self is used in a class to refer to something other than an object instance) and module attributes. It doesn’t work for invocations of instance attributes; I’m not sure that can be done in python without some form of dynamic analysis.

By: prashanthellina

prashanthellina — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:25:47 +0000

“Computer Forum”, Glad you liked it! Enjoy.

By: Computer Forum

Computer Forum — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:21:11 +0000

Amazing article! Detailed and very interested. I am going to recommend this blog to my friends.

By: prashanthellina

prashanthellina — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 05:10:28 +0000

Rick, the code is available already for download. You can find the link in the blog post.

By: Rick

Rick — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:42:58 +0000

Thanks for this – great idea.

I was wondering if you would be willing to send me the script (and any dependencies) you use on this site to generate the graph.
I have an entirely different kind of data that I would like to graph in a similar way.

Thanks again,
Rick

By: prashanthellina

prashanthellina — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 12:55:54 +0000

I find it hard to imagine that “entirely different” functions will be calling each other. an example? I believe that functions that call each other will be doing some common task. Also, increase in speed is not a necessary goal of refactoring. In fact in python when you split a function into smaller functions, you incur a performace hit (albeit very small). The goal is to make the code more maintainable.

By: vikraman

vikraman — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 10:42:49 +0000

This is a good way to split a big python script into smaller ones and including them in one “master script”. But i’m not sure whether such a division will be correct “functionally” because you might have to group functions that perform entirely different things in one file.
plus, There may not be an increase in speed in doing such a thing. However from the point of view of a programmer its pretty neat.

By: prashanthellina

prashanthellina — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 07:08:46 +0000

Although I have not tried yet, extending the script to handle modules and classes should be straight-forward. Like you said, evals, execs and functions being passed around are difficult to handle. Do keep me posted if you get somewhere along these lines. Thanks!

By: Hugo

Hugo — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 06:56:24 +0000

Wow! That’s sweet… I’ll give it a whirl when I have a big graph to generate. pycallgraph’s speed (slow) made me think it is most useful to use it selectively on particular unit tests – but then I’d have to have good unit tests, which I don’t always have.

How tough is it to extend this kind of thing to multiple modules? And what will it not work on, eval statements, obviously. How about use of “getattr” and similar? Basically any time a function is passed as a string, the call will be missed. Right?