hannesm/visualization-middleware

Open Dylan intermediate representation live visualization

Compiler Intermediate Language Visualization

Building compilers is hard. Test cases for compilers are also hard. Compiler optimizations are hard to debug (what failed that this optimization did not kick in?). Some visualizations exist which generate graph files (.dot or similar) which represents the control and data flow at given points in time. These already make the life of a compiler engineer much easier (instead of reading text output, she can look at rendered graphs).

This project moves compiler visualization further on: it shows animated graphs during compilation. The animations show the modifications which were done during a specific optimization phase.

Demo video of an earlier implementation.

This implementation uses a JavaScript frontend, thus the visualization is available in a browser.

Dependencies

• An open dylan compiler from opendylan
• http server
• serialization
• graph.js

Installation

Adjust path to document root in visualization-middleware.dylan Checkout graph.js into static/graph Compile visualization-middleware Start visualization-middleware

It listens by default on 8888 for webbrowser requests. It uses an event stream (server-sent events from HTTP spec) to deliver the tracing events of the compiler.