hairball | automated decomposition of large compilation units

hairball is a Kotlin library. hairball has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities, it has a Permissive License and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

Large compilation units are a common headache in software maintenance. They cause many problems, including long builds, large artifacts, and difficulty sharing code with other software. The traditional way to shrink a large compilation unit is to manually move some of its sources into other compilation units. This requires knowledge of the application's structure and good judgment. In the case of monolithic compilation units that have grown over time, this manual process often runs into circular dependencies: it can feel like every source file imports every other source file, making it impossible to extract a small subset of sources. hairball partially automates this process. When you point jdeps at a jar file and pipe its output to hairball, it computes a way to partition the classes in the jar into clusters, such that there are no circular dependencies between clusters. The output is a .dot file describing a graph structure. You can then use graphviz (not included) to visualize the proposed structure (e.g. dot -Tsvg -o app.svg app.dot). The examples directory contains SVGs of hairball runs on some prominent open-source projects.