To-Callgraph

To-Callgraph

Trace a flow through the codebase end-to-end and hand back a callgraph: an ASCII diagram of every hop, annotated with where work runs concurrently and where it waits. When the user asks about a path — a feature, a flow, a worry like "can we parallelize this?" — the answer starts with the trace.

1. Scope the trace

Pin the entry (the event/message/command that starts the flow) and the exit (what completes it — a rendered frame, a blob URL, a persisted row). Find every path that carries the feature's name: a feature often has two (a CPU preview path and a GPU path, a fast path and a full path), and each gets traced.

Completion criterion: you can state, in one sentence, what enters and what exits each path.

2. Walk the hops

Each hop is one box of the callgraph: event → message → update → command → service → worker/GPU → message → update → model → view. Read the file that handles each hop before drawing the edge — a hop you haven't read is an edge you can't draw.

• Recon the area first: fffind/grep for the feature's names, read what surfaces, then read the project's ADRs/docs for the decisions that shaped the path.
• Before trusting an edge, grep for every caller of the exported symbols it crosses — missed callers are bugs.
• Note the runtime's execution model: are commands forked (concurrent) or queued? That determines which hops are already parallel.

Completion criterion: every edge names a file you actually read; every exported symbol you cite has had its callers grepped.

3. Render the callgraph

ASCII, top-down, one line per hop, file path on the edge, in the house style:

<entry>
  └─ <dispatch> → <message>
       └─ <command.execute>        (forked — concurrent)
            ├─ <service>           ✓ memoized / parallel
            └─ <worker>            ⚠ serializes here — one thread, N requests

Mark every async boundary (postMessage/Deferred, Effect.runFork, GPU submission). Mark every hop that already runs concurrently (✓) and every hop where work queues up (⚠). If a hop spans multiple files, say so.

Completion criterion: a reader can point at any box, ask "where's the code?", and get a file:line.

4. Read the seams

For every ⚠, name the concrete cost and the fix shape: a pool (N workers/threads instead of 1), a cache (memoize a value recomputed per iteration), a move (off the main thread), a coalesce (dedupe identical requests). Also hunt wasted work: the same op repeated per item that could run once (a downscale per LUT instead of per photo). Every bottleneck gets a named fix direction — a complaint without a fix shape is an unfinished seam.