on making a DDE kit, kinda

So I have this task of porting a huge piece of software running on a proprietary OS to another OS. And I don't even have a clue how to compile it (well I do but it builds on windows so it's almost irrelevant).

But luckily all code is linked into a single ELF file and the compilation produces intermediate object files. The first thought I had was to visualize the dependency graph of object files to find out who calls what. You can find the script below that will recursively walk the supplied directory and try to parse the import/export table with objdump. There are some areas for improvement (for example, parsing also the dynsym table with -T or parsing .a archives) but it did the work for me.

Unfortunately I realized that visualizing the graph with 30K edges was not even remotely a smart idea

https://gist.github.com/astarasikov/355bf825f130fe4b5633

What I've also found out was that the OS-specific code and objects was stored in a separate location (since it was a part of an SDK). Even if it were not, we could just remove those object files that were both present in our project and in the SDK. After that, all the functions that the application was requiring from the OS unsurprisingly ended up in the "UNDEFINED" node and there were only 200 of them which gives me some hope.

This approach can also be used for other use-cases. For example, porting drivers from Linux/FreeBSD to exotic platforms - first build the binaries, then pick as many of them as you can to minimize the required functions list. I find dealing with compiled code easier because build systems, C macros and ifdefs just drive me insane.