Dry-run mode to discover entry points

[dwijnand]

I was re-listening to your talk at ScalaDays where Miles was mentioning how feasible this was for libraries, comparing his Shapeless with your comments on applying this to Akka.

You mentioned how Akka's "Actor" class is live, public API and so should be considered an "entry point". Now, Actor is undoubtedly used by many other classes, so my thinking is: it'll be transitively considered live code via any of the other live usages.

So, would it be possible to run ScalaClean in some sort of "dry-run mode"?

I'm unsure about the details but perhaps (and I'm going to simplify and talk only about live/dead classes, not method-level) ScalaClean would traverse all the classes in the libraries classpath and report all the leaf classes that it considers the start of a dead code graph. Then you could take that listing, partition it and save all off all the live, public API classes.