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Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

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Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#31

Post by breck »

akdas wrote: post #23

I worked on something like this a few years ago, only in VR so you could walk around the visualization and use your spatial recognition abilities in 3D. One part we struggled with was evolving the visualization with the codebase. I see in the demos at the bottom that small changes to the codebase can have a large impact on the visualization (unless I'm missing something), making it difficult to treat the visualizatio…

My big bet (10% confident it's correct and will be world changing), is that having languages that rely on spatial position of tokens in a 2D or 3D grid will be a big leap forward and make 3D visualizations quite natural.

I think 3-D visualizations of 1-D languages (all our current programming languages are 1-D) will not be so helpful, as you will be looking at transformations, not the actual code as it exists.

If anyone is intrigued and wants to write a function that takes as input a parsed Tree Notation program (https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/) and outputs a a https://www.mecabricks.com/ file, get in touch! I could even fund something like that, if needed. Such a function would then be able to generate a LEGO version of any program written in a Tree Language. From there, I think there could be interesting discoveries to be made related to future version control systems and collaborative editing algos (I think you could beat CRDT/OT/et al).

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#33

Post by akdas »

breck wrote: post #31
akdas wrote: post #23

I worked on something like this a few years ago, only in VR so you could walk around the visualization and use your spatial recognition abilities in 3D. One part we struggled with was evolving the visualization with the codebase. I see in the demos at the bottom that small changes to the codebase can have a large impact on the visualization (unless I'm missing something), making it difficult to treat the visualizatio…

My big bet (10% confident it's correct and will be world changing), is that having languages that rely on spatial position of tokens in a 2D or 3D grid will be a big leap forward and make 3D visualizations quite natural. I think 3-D visualizations of 1-D languages (all our current programming languages are 1-D) will not be so helpful, as you will be looking at transformations, not the actual code as it exists. If any…

> I think 3-D visualizations of 1-D languages (all our current programming languages are 1-D) will not be so helpful, as you will be looking at transformations, not the actual code as it exists.

This is the part that I disagree with. The source code is linear, sure, but the structure that ties the different components in a codebase together is high-dimensional. For example, the symbol usage graph is really useful to visualize in 3D, as is the general package structure.

And most of these visualizations we see don't even touch on runtime analysis like I was working on! There, seeing different types of data arranged either by where the data is coming from in the source code or where the data is coming from at runtime (analogous to lexical vs. dynamic scoping) is a visualization that benefits from 3D.

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#34

Post by XCSme »

juancampa wrote: post #20

This is cool but using rectangles instead of circles would help this visualization. Circles waste real estate and not friendly to labels (e.g. curved text that is harder to read)

I agree, I like how JS bundle analyzers do it: https://twitter.com/XCSme/status/1410608222872891399

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#35

Post by alphabet9000 »

fire wrote: post #30

Oddly enough, the page partially loads, hangs, crashes the tab and attempts to reload, hangs, and then crashes the entire running mobile chrome instance on my phone. I don't think I've ever seen that before! I'm guessing the page is just memory heavy and android 11's memory manager can't figure out how to deal with it. ( chrome mobile, pixel 3 xl, android 11 )

100% cpu for me, browser tab uses 3+ GB ram, chromium hangs then crashes

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#36

Post by tessierashpool »

hevalon wrote: post #24

Personally I find it interesting as tools like these have been helping me to understand the team's and delivery dynamics when I'm joining new dev-teams. This particular is great, as it reminds me of a book that I had read a while back; Your Code as a Crime Scene [1] by Adam Tornhill. Adam is trying to explain something similar, but takes the whole concept onto the next level by explaining how tech debt and hidden cou…

me too. I have a set of git history analysis scripts that I often use when I'm joining a new team.

they're here:

https://github.com/gilesbowkett/rewind

but they're a bit stale at the moment. one major weakness they have is that they work on a per-repo basis. no problem at all for monorepos, but for a company with a lot of repos, it'd make sense to use the GitHub GraphQL API to find out which repos see the most activity.

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#37

Post by breck »

akdas wrote: post #33
breck wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My big bet (10% confident it's correct and will be world changing), is that having languages that rely on spatial position of tokens in a 2D or 3D grid will be a big leap forward and make 3D visualizations quite natural. I think 3-D visualizations of 1-D languages (all our current programming languages are 1-D) will not be so helpful, as you will be looking at transformations, not the actual code as it exists. If any…

> I think 3-D visualizations of 1-D languages (all our current programming languages are 1-D) will not be so helpful, as you will be looking at transformations, not the actual code as it exists. This is the part that I disagree with. The source code is linear, sure, but the structure that ties the different components in a codebase together is high-dimensional. For example, the symbol usage graph is really useful to…

Yes, I'd agree with you. My wording was poor. I should have said something like "will be helpful, but far more complex to build and use, as they will have to rely on abstract transformations, rather than the natural shape of the code".

I could still be wrong, and really need to get those experiments going again! Thanks for pushing back on that and causing me to think harder.

P.S. I also think runtime analysis is an even more complex problem, and applaud you for attacking it!

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#38

Post by breck »

This is so cool. I really appreciate how they added the "Search for a file" and "Excluded paths" to the demo. Makes it a lot more useful while still so simple to use.

Edit: the more I play with it the more I like it. Also just noticed their feature to deep link to repos (example: https://octo-repo-visualization.vercel.app/?repo=owid%2Fowid...). The future directions they mention also sound really exciting. Seeing files that cause a lot of CI failures, files by # of authors, files by # of changes, all that stuff would be really cool.

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#39

Post by akdas »

dale_glass wrote: post #27
akdas wrote: post #23

I worked on something like this a few years ago, only in VR so you could walk around the visualization and use your spatial recognition abilities in 3D. One part we struggled with was evolving the visualization with the codebase. I see in the demos at the bottom that small changes to the codebase can have a large impact on the visualization (unless I'm missing something), making it difficult to treat the visualizatio…

That sounds interesting, can you give more details about that? I work on Vircadia ( https://vircadia.com/ ) and have been thinking for a while that it would be cool to have in-world visualizations of things like the project's structure and github activity. It's a big one, so perhaps the right 3D representation would make the project's structure more understandable at a glance.

I haven't worked on the project in a while, so I can't comment too much on the current status. But I'm happy to talk about what I learned, the challenges I faced, etc. if you have any questions about those.

The multiplayer aspect is immensely valuable. Having multiple developers walk around the same codebase together, discussing the architecture and the code, is helpful for debugging, onboarding, brainstorming, all the different ways we collaborate as developers. This kind of visualization is not a solo activity, so I can see where Vircadia would come in.

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#40

Post by akdas »

breck wrote: post #37
akdas wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think 3-D visualizations of 1-D languages (all our current programming languages are 1-D) will not be so helpful, as you will be looking at transformations, not the actual code as it exists. This is the part that I disagree with. The source code is linear, sure, but the structure that ties the different components in a codebase together is high-dimensional. For example, the symbol usage graph is really useful to…

Yes, I'd agree with you. My wording was poor. I should have said something like "will be helpful, but far more complex to build and use, as they will have to rely on abstract transformations, rather than the natural shape of the code". I could still be wrong, and really need to get those experiments going again! Thanks for pushing back on that and causing me to think harder. P.S. I also think runtime analysis is an e…

100% agreed. The translation from source code to 3D visualization was ultimately based on choices we made, not on the inherent structure that already was put in place by the developer. The output was still valuable, but when the developer has a say in the output, that's when so much more power would be unlocked!
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