There are definitely many trade-offs with using a circle pack layout - I snuck a bit of the reasoning into the collapsed section halfway through the write-up! Overall, this layout worked best for me, with the nesting feeling very natural and the circles feeling very "atomic".

But big picture, this write-up isn't tied to the current visualization! It's more focused on exploring _how_ a visual representation could help our understanding of codebases. There are tons of jumping off points, including different vizes!

Great idea & execution, I've definitely thought about building something similar and have tried Gource once before. However, I must add a +1 to the parent commenter re: rectangles. Circle packing is pretty, but a proper rectangular tree map interface gives you everything the circle map does with better labels, less wasted space, and less chance of a funky circle layout from the force/relaxing algorithm.

This would be great for a presentation where I'm trying to make our codebase look flashy and cool. But for actually getting work done, I'll take a tree map any day. Check out the mac app GrandPerspective if you haven't seen it - great use of tree maps for cleaning up hard drive space.

I agree, I like how JS bundle analyzers do it: https://twitter.com/XCSme/status/1410608222872891399

Agree on this. Rectangles can also be aligned and given a logical order. It’s probably less nice to the eye than circles, but more useful.