IDE-Independent Program Comprehension Tools via Source File Overwriting

Abstract: Traditionally, we have two possibilities to design tools for program comprehension and analysis. The first option is to create a standalone program, independent of any source code editor. This way, the act of source code editing is separated from the act of viewing the code analysis results. The second option is to create a plugin for a specific IDE (integrated development environment) - in this case, a separate version must be created for each IDE. We propose an approach where information about source code elements is written directly into source files as annotations or special comments. Before committing to a version control system, the annotations are removed from the source code to avoid code pollution. We briefly evaluate the approach and delineate its limitations.