[Espressosaurus]

All of these suck. Use nested bar graphs like TreeSize and it’s instantly obvious what your biggest hitter is for any particular nesting level.

In lieu of that, a flame graph is tolerable. The polar coordinate one is very pretty garbage. EDIT: Use it when you want to mislead people with a flashy graph.

[noosphr]

All embeddings of hyperbolic space into eucleadean space suck. You can't preserve distances and areas between them. Trees live in a hyperbolic space so every visualization of trees on a screen will suck in some way.

This simple math fact is the reason why all grand hyperlink projects from 1960 to 2010 couldn't work, e.g. Xanadu.

Worse, in small examples with fewer than a hundred nodes it looks like it is a real improvement over linear text with jumps - we are after all now using _all_ the possible screen real estate.

[foota]

Ehhh. I think if you're trying to show the overall costs of something to someone that conclusion makes sense, but interactive flame graphs are the best way imo to look into things. Especially making use of sandwich views, which allow you to pivot the flame graph around some function to see callers and callees by cost.

Edit: I'll keep this up to share my embarrassment, but I missed entirely that the article was about disk space. I admit I only looked at the pictures haha.

[alanbernstein]

Why do treemaps suck?

[Espressosaurus]

It's not as straightforward to compare area as sorted length.

Look at the example in the link and try to make sense of it.

[alanbernstein]

I do agree that both styles of treemap shown in the article are inadequate for various reasons, but I don't think that applies to treemaps as a whole.