Some Ways that PyPy uses Graphviz

pypy.org

42 points·genericlemon24··8 comments

I work on a similar tool for Graal graphs at Shopify.

It allows us to understand compilation - like this:

https://chrisseaton.com/truffleruby/basic-graal-graphs/

I really wish Graphviz had some smarter automatic layout algorithms. If I'm not manually laying out the graph, and it isn't one of the select few kinds of graphs that works well, the results are often quite poor.

> I really wish Graphviz had some smarter automatic layout algorithms.

I don't know - the currently smart one are already pretty slow in many cases. I'm not sure I have enough time in the day to wait for something even smarter to run!

Specifically which new algorithms would you like to see?

A difficulty is that implementation is harder than a typical student project, and we need some decent developer documentation.

> Specifically which new algorithms would you like to see?

I don't have the answers, sorry, only the frustrations. I know it's a hard problem, and subjective at that. I don't mean to put graphviz down, it's still the tool I go to.

great to see this -- I will add that, despite ascii-driven GraphViz, there is an eternal idea that graphical user interfaces and solid abstractions could lead to a better experience for a researcher or docs person. Software built as GUI+abstractions have resulted in remarkable environments, but will always have limits in other ways. The math and text input to GraphViz meanwhile, keeps rolling along each decade.

It’s not a very high bar though is it, plaintext input and batch processing to produce image files?

(30 years and 1500K lines of code later) yes that's somewhat true

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