Doxygen
Doxygen is a popular open-source documentation generator for C++, C, Java, Objective-C, Python and other programming languages. It allows developers to document their code with specially formatted comments that Doxygen then parses to produce documentation in various formats like
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Doxygen: Open-Source Documentation Generator for Programming Languages
A popular tool for documenting code with comments, producing HTML, LaTeX, and XML documentation
What is Doxygen?
Doxygen is an open-source documentation generator tool for programming languages like C++, C, Java, Python, and others. It analyzes source code comments formatted in a particular way and generates reference documentation from them.
Doxygen supports documenting a variety of aspects in source code: classes, methods, functions, variables, namespaces, and more. Developers can use special documentation blocks in code and simple commands to auto generate documentation when the code changes. This helps ensure the documentation stays up to date.
The key features of Doxygen include:
- Extracts documentation from source file comments.
- Automatic document generation from code with minimal effort.
- Outputs to various formats like HTML, LaTeX, XML, and others.
- Graphical class diagrams showing inheritance, collaboration, etc.
- Handles plenty of programming languages including C++, C, Python, Java, and more.
- Ability to create customized and templated output.
- Open source with strong community support.
Doxygen helps large projects with a lot of complex code maintain up to date reference documentation easily. Developers can focus on writing specialized comments during the normal development cycle. Then Doxygen handles converting comments to full featured documentation on demand with no extra effort.
Doxygen Features
Features
- Generates documentation from source code comments
- Supports many programming languages like C++, C, Java, Objective-C, Python
- Generates documentation in multiple formats like HTML, LaTeX, XML
- Can extract diagrams like call graphs and inheritance diagrams from code
- Customizable output through templates and CSS stylesheets
- Automatic cross referencing between code entities
- Supports documenting libraries and APIs
- Can generate graphical class hierarchy diagrams
Pricing
- Open Source
Pros
Well established and widely used
Mature and stable codebase
Good integration with various IDEs
Very customizable and extensible
Can generate different output formats
Automates documentation process
Reduces effort to keep docs in sync with code
Diagram generation is useful for understanding code
Cons
Steep learning curve
Configuration can be complex
HTML output styling is outdated
Diagram generation can be slow for large codebases
Limited WYSIWYG editing capabilities
Tagging code with comments can be tedious
Hard to document dynamic languages like Python well
Not ideal for narrative technical writing
Official Links
The Best Doxygen Alternatives
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