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Comment by aftbit | Hacker News Reader

Paste this into your address bar, and press Ctrl-F5 to make it loop again.

  data:text/html,<img src="http://d37rcl8t6g8sj5.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/NO_GC.gif" /> <img src="http://d37rcl8t6g8sj5.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/REF_COUNT_GC.gif" /> <img src="http://d37rcl8t6g8sj5.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/MARK_SWEEP_GC.gif" /> <img src="http://d37rcl8t6g8sj5.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/MARK_COMPACT_GC.gif" /> <img src="http://d37rcl8t6g8sj5.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/COPY_GC.gif" />

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Author here. That's a nice trick to put the animations side-by-side. Thanks!

I had looping versions of the images, but changed them to stop because it seemed confusing to not clearly see the initial and ending states. Refreshing the page to replay an image seemed to work ok, but maybe not in all browsers?

The github project has versions animating longer runtime programs. They are linked from the smaller images in the blog post and might be useful to open side-by-side when reading the text.

I've found that even in cases where a normal refresh won't restart the animations, a Ctrl-F5 will (forcing the images to be reloaded from the server, instead of cache). This is in Firefox on Arch.

Though in this particular case, just reloading the page restarted the animations just fine. Even so, I'll try C-F5 to see if that's better.

What you should do to fix that is to make the very last frame and very first frame much longer. That would make the loop obvious.

Nice graphics!

Instead of looping immediately, you could make the last frame last like 6 seconds, and perhaps have a couple seconds of all-black at the beginning.

And I assume the gif that finishes first is the fastest?

That should be the very first one as it has no GC overhead whatsoever. But I guess that was obvious from the beginning.

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