I built one of these things when working on a very complex graph algorithm a few years ago. It took a month, but without it I wouldn't have been able to spot my bug. I am glad this exists and is general.

The reason this one feels distracting to me is the animation, and the use of force-directed graph layout. Graph layout is hard but I hope they can implement Sugiyama or something instead.

Instead of animation, they could do something like showing deleted nodes in red and new nodes in green, a bit like online chess.

Maybe I'll send a PR their way..

I just used Vis.js for graph visualization without much tweaking. There is also a graphviz visualizer that is not optimized for being stable [1] vs [2]. I would gladly accept any improvements here! Please reach out if I can help you.

Implementing custom visualizations is super easy! See [3] for a very simple example. If you implement a visualization there, it will be available for all people that use the visualization framework (e.g. extensions for other IDEs), not only this extension.

[1] https://hediet.github.io/visualization/?darkTheme=1&state=XQ...

[2] https://hediet.github.io/visualization/?darkTheme=1&state=XQ...

[3] https://github.com/hediet/visualization/blob/33de54d69624e1d...

debug visualizations in fields like computer vision, 3D modeling, or really anything that has a direct visual representation very naturally pull themselves into these debug transformations much more readily than maybe regular data structures and algorithms do. The more complex the transformation the more useful the debugger visualization becomes. It probably doesn't need to be turned on all the time though, it may be an expensive proposition for sure, but when you need to bring out the big guns--by all means visualize away.

That is an emphasis of the approach I was taking here: http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd

Using it feels very different from a traditional debugger where you need to control every step: it's often sufficient to just observe passively and note when incorrect patterns surface.

That's really well done; I wish I had that in the program I'm working on. I ended up traversing my data structure and making a graphviz file, then doing it again after the manipulation I was testing in order to verify that it worked correctly. That works, but it really doesn't scale very well. Plus, the being able to see the individual steps of the algorithm would make it much more clear and obvious.

As an example, http://db48x.net/reposurgeon/pathmap-diagrams/generated-path... is one of the graphs I generated.

Have you published the server and the protocol anywhere? I'd use it even though I would have to write the client side myself. For my project it would even be desirable to write the client side twice; I'm porting a program from one language to another, and it would be amazing to be able to compare the implementations visually.

I am thinking about publishing the source etc soon. I have a mailing list for the project here. I’ve never actually sent anything out on it but I will announce the open sourcing there if you are interested. More info at http://symbolflux.com/luciditystory.html

I really like your projects! Especially your ideas in Tiled Text. I think we should think more outside the box and question our current way to write software.

Thanks! I hope to work on a successor to Tiled Text some day. I have a better sense of how much work is involved now, though. My current approach is to do a smaller project[0] with the potential to help fund work on more ambitious projects like Tiled Text and Lucidity.

[0] https://diskatlas.com/