Visibility Jam Ideas

[bitwitch]

These ideas were all collected from the HMN discord.

• some statistics / informative tool for odin code - show all constants/procedures like the documentation
• an interactive viz of dot graphs
• documenting some big project that's otherwise only accessible via doxygen, or a similarly useless interface. Applies to llvm, ffmpeg, etc.
• a graphing task manager/monitor, so you can see when/how long processes spike above 0%
• sleep schedule tracker using the sqlite database that chrome uses for history
• what is the surface area of a library? How often do you call it?
• compile-time tracker with a web-api, so you can get/track submissions for code-size, lang, time across HMN
• show which processes are communicating with other processes
• how many lightseconds has light traveled during your program runtime?
• callstack depth highscore board / tower of hanoi for system processes
• just something you think might be cool, funny, or interesting to display
• You can scrape the number of maintainers from github and do a dynamic version of that xkcd comic (https://xkcd.com/2347/)
• Show number bytes written to disk as racing cars
  Whichever process writes the most - it's car runs the fastest
  Maybe put the cars on a lap so it can run indefinetely
• Producing a credits screen based on dependencies and github usernames would be cool.
• if you're working on a game project / doing screen record fiddling, perhaps a dynamic pie chart for the colors used on screen, and how much of each you use :P
  maybe we'll find that gears of war was actually purple this whole time :P
• a visualizer/debugger for the bitwise operations
• A memory visualizer
• File formats visualizer
• z-curve memory viewer (for wasm)
• Debug panel for Orca
  Things like a flamegraph, a memory view, seeing what native resources are allocated on behalf of an app, what host API it calls, etc.
• A glorified grep that works on github repos, that would allow to explore the file structure of a repo, search for identifier's definitions, list all callees/callers of a given function, etc... without leaving the browser
• A viz tool for papers / blog posts showing citations and chronological relationships, topic proximity, etc
• create a heatmap of your keyboard usage
• maybe someone could build a traceroute that uses geoip to show the physical path
• some sort of specialized memory viewer
  E.g. a memory visualizer that is specialized to display information about memory arenas. So you can see what lifetimes are grouped together.
• A tool that records a program's execution, and visualizes stack/heap memory corruption. This could be helpful for CTF competitions.
  I'm thinking of a program that breaks at a memory corruption (like ASAN) and allows you to single-step after that, while showing you a diagram of stack frames or heap data structures and how they got affected by the corruption.
• apart from annotating allocations I was also thinking of extracting type info from debug info and using it to mark what each chunk of memory is with ability to read/write to it and , maybe visualize relations between data
• ELF/DWARF parser that provides a tree like view
• generate html pages of source code with links to function definitions, etc., for browsing and reading code (something similar to https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/include/linux/fs.h)
• dumb jam idea: graph the rate of change for your scroll wheel. when / how much do you scroll at a time?
• a tool to help gain insight/understanding of a codebase, maybe show which functions call other functions, display a call graph, etc.

[tensorush]

I got the idea of creating a Zig codebase viz tool from reading this list. Just wanted to say thanks for jamming out those ideas and inspiring others!

[bitwitch]

Ah nice that's awesome! All the ideas came from various people on the HMN discord, I just compiled the list, but I'm glad you took some inspiration from it!