[tikimcfee]

Can I throw my hat in the ring? I’ve been working on this for.. a long time.

AR VR iOS and macOS app for arbitrary code rendering in 3D space. Terminal like rendered glyph by glyph means perfect control over ever mesh and texture.

The iOS demo is fun. You can walk around your code like an art museum, draw lines of executed traces, and perform visual hierarchical search.

https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat

[juliusgeo]

Wow, this looks very impressive. Going to check it out. Is there any plan to support languages other than Swift? I’m assuming that has quite a few technical hurdles associated.

[tikimcfee]

Thank you very much, and absolutely! My hope is to convert to a treesitter implementation instead of the SwiftSyntax direct parser. There’s a file filter in there that can be turned off to load any particular file up for viewing, but the analysis stuff won’t work of course.

The tracing is more complicated. SwiftTrace is a bit tangly, and I’m still trying to think of a way for folks to “drop in” something to their code base to produce a structured set of traces. There’s a file-backed array that is is used to read compacted run logs, so as long as I can can get the format right, it should work for most cases. I even experimented with a syntax rewriter to insert logs!

What languages do you use? What would you like to see supported?

[juliusgeo]

Thanks for the reply! The main reason I ask that is I primarily use Python and Julia, which have pretty decent tracing abilities but there are still a lot of rough edges when it comes to visualizing those traces. Particularly with Python, the default tracing packages such as cProfile are quite lacking in terms of support for visualizing and exploring the output of the profiling (most likely by design, but still frustrating nonetheless). It's necessary to bring in Snakeviz for visualizing, and it is quite good, but the HTML UI that it is run has very limited options when it comes to distinct ways of visualizing the data.

[LordDragonfang]

If you're taking suggestions for languages, support for javascript+html would also be a nice addition, since it's the de facto common language at this point.

[tikimcfee]

I’m with you 100% here. I don’t have support for syntax yet, and I’m going to see what I can do about that soon. The rendering support is all there, at least, and I need to make sure I call that out too. Thank you for the ping! Please feel free to keep in touch with other ideas or brain dumps!

[simse]

Looks very interesting, thanks for sharing this.

[tikimcfee]

You’re quite welcome, I’m all too glad to share my obsessions, haha. Let me know if you’re interested in a little personal demo of the latest stuff- the Metal based implementation I’ve been cooking up has pretty awesome performance, on the order of millions of glyphs at 60+ FPS.

Thanks for asking around and letting me share