Show HN: Visualize Data Structures in VS Code

Re:Show HN: Visualize Data Structures in VS Code by philsnow on Friday August 28, 2020 @01:55PM (#24307927)

This reminds me a bit of `ddd` [0] which has been around ~forever. It really helped me visualize some object relationships in ThoughtTreasure [1] back in school.

A main difference seems to be you have to tell vscode-debug-visualizer how/what to show in the code, whereas with ddd you either point-and-click or else run gdb/ddd commands like `graph display _variablename_`. I guess you could probably script the latter, but I like how vscode-debug-visualizer reifies what you're visualizing into the code itself instead of into a debugging session.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThoughtTreasure

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Re:Show HN: Visualize Data Structures in VS Code by db48x on Saturday August 29, 2020 @12:31AM (#24313542)

I too enjoyed using ddd back in the day. A few weeks ago I needed to visualize a complicated data structure in a Rust program that I'm working on and sadly it completely failed (http://db48x.net/reposurgeon/Screenshot%20from%202020-08-04%...). I spent some time trying to figure out how it was supposed to work (my guess is that GDB's pretty-printer is getting in the way), but didn't have much luck. I think we're going to have to reimplement some of this stuff. I ended up writing some code to dump the data structure out to graphviz. (http://db48x.net/reposurgeon/pathmap-diagrams/generated-path...)

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Re:Show HN: Visualize Data Structures in VS Code by Gehinnn on Saturday August 29, 2020 @03:47AM (#24314464)

Then this extension might be able to help you! You can visualize graphviz dot data that is stored in a rust string.

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Re:Show HN: Visualize Data Structures in VS Code by db48x on Saturday August 29, 2020 @04:26AM (#24314610)

I don't really need an editor extension in order to visualize graphviz data; I already have graphviz.

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