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I found call tracers to be the most efficient way to do this kind of thing. It could be as simple as a perl script inserting printfs on every call and every return, since not every compiler supports instrumentation.

Simply digging through code, tests or reading commit messages in an unfamiliar code base takes at least an order of magnitude more time.

EDIT: tried call graphs too, better than reading through code, but still require you to understand and filter out a lot of unnecessary information.




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