Show HN: I made a parser visualizer using manim | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made a parser visualizer using manim

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I've heard it said previously that manim is hard to use if you're not 3b1b. Is this (still) true? How hard was the manim side of things to implement, subjectively speaking?

Since I last used it, it looks like there has been a lot of work on manim in the community fork [1]. It used to definitely be a fair amount of work to figure things out, but it looks like things are easier now. I remember having to dig through source code for everything and the SVG rendering was a nightmare, but since then there's now some proper documentation [2] and an overhaul of how manim does SVG rendering [3]. Looks like it's much nicer to use now. It's worth messing around with if you haven't used manim before

[1] https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim/

[2] https://docs.manim.community/en/v0.4.0/index.html

[3] https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim/pull/915

All points roboticmind said are true There is also a good tutorial for manim on YouTube [1]

Coming to this project, getting things working with original manim (ManimGL) was a bit of a pain, however, the community edition works very nice. I have compared the outputs produced by ManimGL and ManimCE in the docs [2], you can have a look at that as well

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2B6OzTsMUrwo4hA3BBfS...

[2]: https://ashutoshbsathe.github.io/yacv/manim-comparison/

The readme doesn't show any example visualizations...

watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BozB0O0__Qg

The README file will link you to the demo video on YouTube [1]. There is also a working example section [2] on the landing page of documentation which shows what all visualizations yacv can produce given a CFG and a string

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BozB0O0__Qg

[2]: https://ashutoshbsathe.github.io/yacv/#working-example

Great timing, I currently have a homework for my compiler class about doing LL by hand. I'll give this a go later today to help me visualize.

Would be nice if you could provide some visual examples of it. Intrested to see how it will look like in the end.

I found a visual example here: https://ashutoshbsathe.github.io/yacv/

Ahh thanks for that, guess i just didnt look into it enough to find it.

This video shows yacv visualizations of LL(1) and LR(1) parsing. https://youtu.be/BozB0O0__Qg

Video makes it hard to understand what's changed from frame to frame. I think static < animated < interactive.

I also find that for a first time user, it may be a bit hard to figure out what's exactly going on. I experimented with slowing down the animation after every step, let the user take in what's happened and then move to next step but that made the video too long and kinda boring for experienced users

I figured after watching 1-2 such visualizations, you get used to looking at exactly the parts that are changing and then it works without explicitly slowing down the video

I love it. I will definitely use it in the compiler class I will be teaching in Fall. Please improve the README file.

Thanks. Using this for teaching was my primary goal too ! Please let me know how it goes.

Can you give me some pointers for improving README ? I know README isn't the best out there, but I'm also not sure what I must change to make it better

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