Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?

What are some of the open source tools that you are referring to? Within a few hours, I can imagine it being difficult to integrate and deploy your tools into an existing stack. But if you are tapping into some mirrored network port, that would make more sense.

The issue with modeling from any specific detail-specifying system is that the result is invariably outside that range, for some systems.

Model to a brain target, not a standard level of detail.

For visualizing system designs, you should take a look at STAMP, e.g., via “Engineering A Safer World” + the resources at mit.edu/psas + on YouTube.

(Multiple tools, both commercial and libre, exist and are being developed to make these diagrams, although for what it’s worth, I mostly hear about people making them using draw.io, Google Drawings, on physical paper/whiteboards, or occasionally with specialized tooling.

I have also recently published a project in this area, https://github.com/mstone/depict, which I believe is well on its way toward addressing some unmet needs here.)

For visualizing protocols, things like sequence diagrams, data flow diagrams, DRAKON flow charts, value stream maps, and occasional more specialized objects like CPSA “cryptographic protocol shapes” / strand space skeletons are where I start depending on the flavor of what’s needed.

For visualizing the design of implementations themselves, I have not yet seen anything that I feel obliged to recommend; rather, here, I suggest investing in adding illustrations to your existing documentation in whatever way is easiest for you to use to clarify whatever subtleties you need to clarify for your audience.

(Here I tend to look at things like ASCII-art, SQLite’s railroad diagrams (now made with pikchr, AIUI), and sequence diagrams, as mentioned by other commenters, as helpful examples to start with.)

Finally, for implementing debugging/profiling/operational illustrations, there is a such a rich set of examples to turn to — whether from the very specialized (custom process model video rendering pipelines in robotics) to TensorBoard for TensorFlow to general-purpose tools like browser performance debugging suites, flame charts, or Go’s built-in profile graphing tools - that rather than learn any particular such tools, I’d instead suggest trying to get comfortable with the building blocks underlying these systems, which include contemporary GUI/web apps, custom drawing and animation tools like SVG, pretty printers, and Grammar-of-Graphics systems like vega-lite.

(Note: although it may seem superficially extraneous to your question, the reason I also suggest thinking about debugging visualizations in this context is because IMO, to work, they ~necessarily encode a visual model of the design of your implementation since it is the design of the implementation that provides the vocabulary and relationships that have to be understood and navigated in order to successfully debug/optimize/monitor any given running instance of whatever system you are building.)

The divio system is a good place to start, IMO, when it comes to organization: https://documentation.divio.com/

So, I would treat a visualization used in an explanation-style document very differently from a reference guide. One is intended to illustrate a concept quickly, another is intended to be precise. I don't think you'll see a single "visual system" ever take over, largely because documentation can have very, very different goals for the reader.

Visualizations in reference guides are (unfortunately) rare. I happen to like the approach taken by project reactor, embedding visuals into java reference docs: https://projectreactor.io/docs/core/release/api/