How to Reverse Engineer or explore an existing GH file

I am more of a script based computational designer and so I want to understand if there is a way to look at an already existing file with a step by step exploratory option?
So there are many Nodes connected to each other and I see this complex network of strings linking them across, I would love to have an option to look at the file in a script based format knowing how things are connected to explore a current GH file.

Thank you

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on October 2, 2012 at 11:44am

Hi Reeti,

the term 'reverse engineer' is not very apt I think, as a Grasshopper network is not a 'compiled' version of something else. Nor does the document create text-based source code that actually runs. The document (i.e. the components and wires connecting them) is what is created and it is what actually runs.

However, it does make sense to ask; "What would the C# code look like that does the same as this Grasshopper document?" (to pick a language somewhat at random)

Unfortunately the answer is; "Nobody knows". Grasshopper itself and its component libraries are not obfuscated, but it is against the license agreement to disassemble them. Some 3rd party components are obfuscated and cannot be disassembled. Upshot is that most components are black boxes the internal workings of which are not and cannot be known to the user.

But even if you could somehow get high-quality source for each component, there's still an incredible amount of code that gets executed in between components to do with validation and data recombination and type-casting. Putting all this into a single C# project would probably leave you with thousands and thousands of lines of really difficult to read source code.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

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