A pragmatic hybrid approach—fast tag-based navigation backed by semantic indexing for heavy queries—provides a good balance for AOSP-scale codebases. The reference stack (universal-ctags, clangd/Kythe extractors, Zoekt, lightweight Go API) gives a license-friendly, performant, and incremental cross-reference system.
He was an AOSP archeologist, one of the last who understood the original Android Open Source Project not as a product, but as a garden . For a decade, he had tended the forks, the custom ROMs, the little patches that kept ancient devices breathing. But now, the corporations had won. Every path was walled. Every repo sync demanded a key. Every xref —the cross-reference tool that mapped the soul of the codebase—was locked behind a login. xref aosp free
: See a "find usages" list to understand how a specific API is used across the entire operating system . For a decade, he had tended the forks,