Hasty Briefsbeta

Flowistry: An IDE plugin for Rust that focuses on relevant code

a day ago
  • #IDE Integration
  • #Rust
  • #Development Tools
  • Flowistry is a tool for analyzing information flow in Rust programs, helping developers understand code dependencies.
  • It integrates into IDEs with a 'focus mode' that highlights relevant code while fading out unrelated sections.
  • Flowistry is available as a VSCode plugin and can also be installed from source, with specific installation steps provided.
  • The tool has limitations, such as not fully supporting interior mutability (e.g., Arc<Mutex<T>>) and analyzing only single functions at a time.
  • Flowistry uses Rust's MIR graph for analysis but may lose some source-level information during the process.
  • Installation issues, especially on NixOS or ARM targets like M1 Macs, are noted, along with potential rustup conflicts.
  • The tool is an active research project, with ongoing development to improve its analysis techniques and interaction paradigms.