OpenUnderstand

An open-source implementation of the SciTools Understand Python API, for Java.

Understand reads a codebase and lets you ask questions about it -- which methods call this one, what does this class contain, how complex is this function. The API is good. The analysis is closed: the database format is proprietary, the API source is not published, and it needs a licence.

OpenUnderstand reimplements that API on top of an ANTLR4 Java parser and a SQLite database, so the same scripts run without one.

import openunderstand.ounderstand as und

db = und.open("myproject.udb")

for cls in db.ents("Class"):
    print(cls.longname())
    for ref in cls.refs("Define", "Method"):
        print("   ", ref.ent().name(), "at line", ref.line())

That is Understand's API, unchanged. Same class names, same method signatures, same kind names.

Install

pip install openunderstand

Python 3.9 to 3.14. On Linux x86_64, macOS arm64 and Windows x64 that wheel carries the C++ parse accelerator, which is 7.8x faster at parsing and takes about a third off a full analysis. Everywhere else the pure-Python ANTLR runtime is used instead and everything works the same, just slower -- both engines produce byte-identical databases.

Optional extras:

From a checkout instead:

git clone https://github.com/m-zakeri/OpenUnderstand
cd OpenUnderstand
python -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Build a database

Point it at a directory of Java source:

python openunderstand/ounderstand/openunderstand.py \
    -r /path/to/java/project \
    -dba /path/for/database \
    -dbn myproject.udb \
    -l /path/for/app.log

Or from Python:

from openunderstand.ounderstand.openunderstand import start_parsing

start_parsing(
    repo_address="/path/to/java/project",
    db_address="/path/for/database",
    db_name="myproject.udb",
    engine_core="C++",
    log_address="/path/for/app.log",
)

The result is a .udb file. Despite the name it is plain SQLite -- open it with any SQLite tool if you want to poke at the rows directly.

How correct is it?

Honestly measured, not claimed. Every release is compared against a licensed SciTools Understand install on the same source, entity by entity, reference by reference, metric by metric.

Current agreement, over eleven Java systems and 174,260 Understand entities:

Three of the subjects, for comparison with earlier releases:

Both sides are scoped the same way: Understand indexes the whole Java library whether or not a JDK is added to the project, and its dump keeps only entities declared under the fixture root, so this project's placeholders for those same names -- java.lang.String, java.util.ArrayList -- are excluded too. Counting ours while its counterparts were dropped understated entity precision by 5 to 14 points depending on the subject.

docs/parity.md has the per-kind breakdown.

The comparison is the specification: what the real tool outputs is what decides whether a reference is right. Understand must be installed and licensed, so it is not part of this repository -- ask if you want to run it.

tests/ holds unit tests for the pass rules that comparison established. They need no database and run in about a second each:

for t in tests/test_*.py; do .venv/bin/python -W ignore "$t"; done

Re-analysing after an edit

A full build is not the only way in. update_files() re-analyses the files you name and every file that depends on them, deleting each one's previous contribution first:

from openunderstand.oudb import api

db = api.open("myproject.udb")
api.update_files(["/path/to/java/project/src/Foo.java"],
                 source_root="/path/to/java/project")

It reproduces what a rebuild of the same source would write, which is the point -- an update that only ever adds leaves a renamed method in the database under both names.

How fast is it?

On the 85-file org.json benchmark, on one ordinary Linux machine:

Understand is C++ over a purpose-built store, so a full build being within about 1.4x of it is the interesting part -- and re-analysing after an edit, which is what an editor integration actually does, is faster here, because it does less work rather than doing the same work quickly.

Pass jobs= to openunderstand.ounderstand.runner.runner() for the parallel build, or set OU_JOBS. Workers only parse and collect and one process writes, so the database is byte-identical whatever the worker count -- which is also why more than about four workers buys nothing.

Use it from an assistant

An MCP server ships with the package:

pip install "openunderstand[mcp]"

{"mcpServers": {"openunderstand": {"command": "openunderstand-mcp"}}}

Seven tools (analyze, open_database, update, list_entities, entity_references, entity_metrics, list_kinds), four resources exposing the kind vocabulary and metric names, and three prompts (review_class, complexity_hotspots, trace_callers) -- so an assistant can analyse a Java project and ask what calls what, without knowing the schema. See docs/mcp.md.

Use it from IntelliJ IDEA

idea-plugin/ builds a Java Metrics tool window: analyse the open project, sort by any metric, browse the symbol table and any entity's references, double-click to jump to the declaration, export CSV. It runs the analysis in a Python subprocess, in a private virtualenv it builds and installs itself.

cd idea-plugin && gradle buildPlugin    # then install the zip from disk

See docs/idea-plugin.md.

What it does not do

• Java 9-25 is analysed, measured against Understand. Records, sealed types and permits, pattern variables and record patterns, var (including lambda parameters), switch expressions, local enums and interfaces, and module-info.java are modelled the way Understand models them, checked on jenetics' incubator module and a hand-written probe. Java 25 compact source files (top-level methods) do not parse; import module parses but cannot be checked, because Understand 7.0 itself does not parse it.
• No external resolution. The JDK and third-party jars are not analysed, so java.lang.String exists but has no members.
• Partial coverage. 90 to 98% of Understand's references are reproduced at the exact position, at 62 to 88% precision. 46 of the 49 public API methods are implemented.
• Silence, not refusal, on what is missing. The three unimplemented methods -- Db.close, Db.lookup_uniquename, Violation.add_fixit_hint -- return None. Querying a reference kind no pass emits returns an empty list, which reads exactly like an entity that has none. NotImplementedError is not raised anywhere in the query API, whatever this file used to say.

Documentation

Published at m-zakeri.github.io/OpenUnderstand.

Contributing

Read docs/architecture.md first -- particularly the rule that kind ids are positions and must always be resolved by name.

Changes to the analysis are judged against Understand, not against opinion. If you can run the comparison, report recall and precision before and after -- a change that raises recall by tanking precision is not an improvement. If you cannot, say what you expect to change and it will be measured for you.

Pull requests target the dev branch.

Credits

Started at the IUST Reverse Engineering Research Laboratory. Uses ANTLR4, peewee, and a labelled fork of the grammars-v4 Java grammar.