Abstract

Today in the world of the software industry, the use of libraries and frameworks has become very common to abstract complex implementations in modern software. This gave rise to a new challenge of tracking and monitoring external dependencies due to various reasons like security, company or team design philosophy or both. In this paper, we delve into the tools provided by the Go language to solve this problem and some of its limitations. Based on those learning, we have created a library for visualizing internal and external dependencies for Go based projects. This library generates a tree-like structure to give users a better visual representation about how dependencies are used across projects. We also delve into how popular tools and frameworks by different organizations and individuals make software design choices around the use of external libraries or dependencies.