[HN Gopher] Visualizing entire Chromium include graph
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       Visualizing entire Chromium include graph
        
       Author : bkryza
       Score  : 46 points
       Date   : 2025-05-21 15:19 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.bkryza.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.bkryza.com)
        
       | adrian_b wrote:
       | When I have reached the first image shown after "Visualization",
       | I have chuckled, thinking "Yeah... this is not going to be very
       | useful".
       | 
       | However, immediately after that image the author has written
       | exactly the same thought, then further in TFA much more
       | interesting images are shown, so I have been impressed.
        
       | kloud wrote:
       | Great work, very cool trick using the clang commands output to
       | get the data.
       | 
       | In my experiments with software visualization I found that
       | generic graph tools like Graphviz or Gephi do not produce useful
       | visualizations for anything beyond trivial size projects. In
       | systems there is always a hierarchical aspect, so hierarchical
       | graphs seem to be clearer as in comparison [0].
       | 
       | Unfortunately, I am not aware of a good open source hierarchical
       | graph tool. Only one seems to be a proprietary Visual Studio DGML
       | renderer. However, this Chrome graph with 140k nodes would also
       | be too much, VS chokes around 25k nodes+links.
       | 
       | [0] https://github.com/dundalek/stratify?tab=readme-ov-
       | file#extr...
        
         | dekhn wrote:
         | It's dated: https://lgl.sourceforge.net/
        
         | simpaticoder wrote:
         | _> this Chrome graph with 140k nodes would also be too much_
         | 
         | I've heard the rule of thumb from Tufte is that a visualization
         | cannot have more than 1000 elements and still be useful.
         | However, I'm not sure he said that and I cannot find supporting
         | evidence...but it seems right to me.
         | 
         | Consider that mapping programs maintain the same level of
         | information density at every level of zoom. I'm not sure, but
         | this might be called "semantic zoom". I remember Microsoft
         | doing a demo of Photosynth (now defunct) years ago which
         | demonstrated impressive results.
         | 
         | One approach would be to play around with grouping nodes in
         | useful ways, perhaps even dynamically according to user input,
         | such that the resulting bundles represent ~100 raw nodes on
         | average yielding ~1000 bundle nodes in the top-level
         | visualization.
        
       | NewsaHackO wrote:
       | Am I the oy one that thinks a couple of these graphs look like
       | penises?
        
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       (page generated 2025-05-21 23:01 UTC)