Graphviz has really helped me in the past with troubleshooting giant CMake projects with lots of dependencies.
Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
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Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#82I love Graphviz! It’s in the Observable standard library as the dot tagged template literal, powered by Viz.js.
https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/dot
Here’s a recent example where I used it to figure out why certain dependencies are in my node_modules:
Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#83Graphviz is an amazing tool, it has just suffered from being cloistered to technologists whose jobs aren't to solve the kinds of problems it is specifically adapted for. I use graphs in security and privacy quite a bit, and even built the tech for a hopeful security platform using a graph back end. They yield the fastest path through complex problems, and I use them to do in a couple of hours what typically would tak…
I found the learning curve to be quite steep with few examples of graphs that looked well-designed. By default, large graphs look like crap because engineers designed it, not designers (it takes both!).
However, that was back in the late 90's. Now the internet has many examples of better looking layouts, but it is still disappointing that they don't look ... designed?
But integration and automation are great. Like GNUPlot, which I've used for decades because it is so easy to automate once you learn how to make plots look better than the default.
GStreamer uses DOT output by default. But any reasonably sized pipeline is almost impossible to read without excessive zooming. But it gets the job done.
Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#84I've used Graphviz for many years and my main gripe with it is the lack of customization. Yes, there's "some" customization, but there's a point (not too far from the initial style) where, if you don't like the output, you're out of luck and might as well redraw it using draw.io or some other WYSIWYG editor.
Graph viz is admirably powerful, even here. The main techniques seem to be invisible objects and custom code, in case that helps. The cassowary solver group in Australia (I'm blanking on the university, Monash?) goes further via custom constraint logic, and I believe iOS layouts were deeply inspired, and maybe even had one of their students.
Graph technologies are tricky to build up -- you can go deep in many areas like this. Afaict, AT&T/Bell Research used to be the main developers of graphviz, and when that corporate lab thinned out, so did graph viz development. A similar story happened with gephi devs when they left their universities (was popular in social data), and cytoscape (popular in bio) is still largely at that fragile state.
We are historically big contributors to OSS at Graphistry, but saw the history of funding issues in this space, and how each tool reached a frustratingly low ceiling due to it. We decided to not start as open core, and instead made a free GPU tier + release individual pieces as OSS (Apache Arrow's JS tier, etc) + initially charge for GPU code, until we could build + grow more commercially targeted parts. Thankfully, we are getting to the point of enough sustainable revenue that we are pushing much more to our OSS libs now, and one of our OSS pushes for 2022 will be moving custom (GPU-accelerated) traditional layouts & AI layouts to the OSS lib pygraphistry :) A request we get often get for pygraphistry and our file uploader UI is dotfile (and graphml/gexf) conversion/ingest for then viewing+editing in our scalable interactive graph renderer, so we have been thinking of adding a pygraphistry example just to demonstrate the OSS flow!
Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#85Graphviz is one of my favourite tools, but I use it very rarely. I noticed a mention of support for UTF-8 and some great documentation layout improvements, but what are the other big features that have been implemented in the last few years?
Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#86Here are some cool things I've done recently with graphviz: 1. Draw "sketch" style graphs using https://sketchviz.com/new 2. Draw graphs of memory usage in golang programs (using pprof): https://graphviz.org/Gallery/directed/pprof.html 3. Embed graphviz into Sphinx docs (shameless self-promotion: https://docs.robusta.dev/master/catalog/triggers/index.html#... )
I once created a dataset of X-hooked-up-with-Y for my circle of friends. About 50 nodes and a few hundred connections (after I asked around a bit for additions).
It became a wedding present for one rather central "node" with the title "drosophila neural regulation network" or something like it. No names, just lines and circles. It's still the centerpiece in his home office.
Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#87I love Graphviz! It’s in the Observable standard library as the dot tagged template literal, powered by Viz.js. https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/dot Here’s a recent example where I used it to figure out why certain dependencies are in my node_modules: https://twitter.com/mbostock/status/1479693504511053824
Is there a fork of viz.js that’s still maintained? The original was abandoned in 2018.
Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#88I love Graphviz! It’s in the Observable standard library as the dot tagged template literal, powered by Viz.js. https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/dot Here’s a recent example where I used it to figure out why certain dependencies are in my node_modules: https://twitter.com/mbostock/status/1479693504511053824
Is there a fork of viz.js that’s still maintained? The original was abandoned in 2018.
no.
two steps above the abandoned version, before the web threads attempt, works quite nicely.
Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#89For the ASCII lovers, I made this simple web page to help convert dot to text diagrams: https://dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com It's useful to embed diagrams directly in source code for example. Here is a sample [0]: 0.6 ┌─────────────────────────┐ ▼ │ ┌───┐ 0.8 ┌───┐ 0.1 ┌───┐ 0.7 ┌───┐ 0.2 ┌───┐ │ d │ ─────▶ │ │ ◀───── │ e │ ─────▶ │ a │ ─────▶ │ b │ └───┘ │ c │ └───┘ └───┘ └───┘ │ │ 0.4 │ │ │ ◀─────────────────────────…
I love this and wrote about it in my newsletter on network thinking [0] – thank you!
Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#90For the ASCII lovers, I made this simple web page to help convert dot to text diagrams: https://dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com It's useful to embed diagrams directly in source code for example. Here is a sample [0]: 0.6 ┌─────────────────────────┐ ▼ │ ┌───┐ 0.8 ┌───┐ 0.1 ┌───┐ 0.7 ┌───┐ 0.2 ┌───┐ │ d │ ─────▶ │ │ ◀───── │ e │ ─────▶ │ a │ ─────▶ │ b │ └───┘ │ c │ └───┘ └───┘ └───┘ │ │ 0.4 │ │ │ ◀─────────────────────────…
If you're on mobile you're going to want to rotate your phone.