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Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

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Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#51

Post by taeric »

I really really want to like these sorts of visualizations. But they just fall flat on me.

The "you can see really quickly..." text is scrolling by and I'm like... "Nope, that picture still means nothing to me." :(. It starts highlighting different parts and I'm completely at a loss on what is highlighted.

I do think this can be very effective once I'm trained on it. Such that I plan to play with it. But I just don't visually think of programs in anything close to this manner.

Anyone know if studies that explore how we think of our programs?

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#53

Post by LeftHandPath »

dvt wrote: post #42

Apologies for the hot take, but imo GitHub has been really knocking it out of the park with terrible ideas lately (remember how everyone fell all over themselves during the Copilot release?). This is an absolutely worthless visualization that only impresses those that haven't heavily worked with visualizations. A few points right off the bat: - Labels are way too small, so you'll need to zoom in.. - ...but if you zoo…

It's probably useless - but it would make for a killer powerpoint slide at your next meeting, wouldn't it?

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#54

Post by Zababa »

noproto wrote: post #41

Took a look at my own codebase, which is 99% Rust. All gray, I'm guessing Rust isn't currently a recognized file type? Either way, very nice! I currently use the "dirtree" tool ( https://github.com/emad-elsaid/dirtree ) to generate diagrams like this of my codebase for documentation: https://github.com/WhiteBeamSec/WhiteBeam/wiki/Code-layout The "eralchemy" tool ( https://github.com/Alexis-benoist/eralchemy ) is also…

.ml and .mli files are not recognized either. Still, it's a fun tool.

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#55

Post by dandelany »

wattenberger wrote: post #21
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)

There are definitely many trade-offs with using a circle pack layout - I snuck a bit of the reasoning into the collapsed section halfway through the write-up! Overall, this layout worked best for me, with the nesting feeling very natural and the circles feeling very "atomic". But big picture, this write-up isn't tied to the current visualization! It's more focused on exploring _how_ a visual representation could help…

Great idea & execution, I've definitely thought about building something similar and have tried Gource once before. However, I must add a +1 to the parent commenter re: rectangles. Circle packing is pretty, but a proper rectangular tree map interface gives you everything the circle map does with better labels, less wasted space, and less chance of a funky circle layout from the force/relaxing algorithm.

This would be great for a presentation where I'm trying to make our codebase look flashy and cool. But for actually getting work done, I'll take a tree map any day. Check out the mac app GrandPerspective if you haven't seen it - great use of tree maps for cleaning up hard drive space.

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#56

Post by hsn915 »

I honestly don't understand the point of this.

Is it just a visualization of the directory structure?

I expect code visualization to more or less ignore the file structure and focus on semantic analysis. For example, show the major components of the system and how they interact. Perhaps the major components are represented by some kind of a module, or a collection of modules. I don't have any concrete ideas. But I was expecting something in this vicinity.

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#57

Post by eenell »

wattenberger wrote: post #50
spartanatreyu wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's useful in it's current form (except perhaps for newcomers to a project to have an idea of the file structure at a glance). But I also don't think they're trying to present this as a new killer feature they've been working on for years. I'm pretty sure this is just an experiment/exploration done by a few people over a few months to see what they found, then they presented their results.

Spot on! It's a space I've been wanting to explore, and so have been tinkering with it this last week while we're in between larger projects. I definitely don't see it being a product in it's current gotten, but wanted to share the exploration! Although I will say that the more I've been visualizing different repos, the more convinced I am that it's more useful than is easy to convey.

Have you looked at CodeScene at all?

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#59

Post by tasogare »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #46
dvt wrote: post #42

Apologies for the hot take, but imo GitHub has been really knocking it out of the park with terrible ideas lately (remember how everyone fell all over themselves during the Copilot release?). This is an absolutely worthless visualization that only impresses those that haven't heavily worked with visualizations. A few points right off the bat: - Labels are way too small, so you'll need to zoom in.. - ...but if you zoo…

The guy literally says he timeboxed his exploration on this experiment . I think it's pretty cool and would love to have the option to navigate repositories like this.

Author is a woman.

Re: Show HN: Visualizing a Codebase

#60

Post by wattenberger »

eenell wrote: post #57
wattenberger wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on! It's a space I've been wanting to explore, and so have been tinkering with it this last week while we're in between larger projects. I definitely don't see it being a product in it's current gotten, but wanted to share the exploration! Although I will say that the more I've been visualizing different repos, the more convinced I am that it's more useful than is easy to convey.

Have you looked at CodeScene at all?

I hadn't seen it until today - looks like a useful product!
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