Lakos’ Analysis Tools

John Lakos wrote the book Large-Scale C++ Software Design, in which he describes many issues of developing C++ software for large projects. As part of this book, he also provided a number of utilities to manage dependencies in a C++ project. This include:

• adep: creates aliases to group files into cohesive components
• cdep: extracts compile-time dependencies from several files
• ldep: analyzes link-time dependencies among various components

These utilities were originally written in the mid-1990s, though some engineers have attempted to make these utilities work with modern compilers. Here are some links if you’re interested in looking into these:

• http://rdfintrospector.blogspot.com/2006/08/configuration-tools-part-1-lsc-large.html
• http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/introspector/LSC-rpkg-0.1.tgz?download