Badass JavaScript

A showcase of awesome JavaScript that pushes the boundaries of what's possible on the web, by @devongovett.

TraceGL: A JavaScript Codeflow Visualization and Debugging Tool using WebGL

April 23rd 2013

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Rik Arends has just released TraceGL, an interesting JavaScript codeflow debugging tool using WebGL for its UI rendering.  Described as “an oscilloscope, for code”, TraceGL is an improvement on the familiar step debuggers that can be found in browser dev tools like Chrome, Firebug, and now Firefox itself.

TraceGL works by instrumenting all of your code so it knows when calls took place, and all of the boolean logic that determined which code path to take.  Then it visualizes all of this, using WebGL for performance, showing you a high level overview called the “mini map” in the top left, a log of function calls in the top right, the call stack in the bottom left, and finally the code for the function in the bottom right.

As your code runs, TraceGL visualizes all of this data in real time.  The mini map is useful to see the ebbs and flows of the code, i.e. where the stack gets deeper and shallower again.  In this way, you can see where events are being processed, like mouse or keyboard events in the browser, or HTTP requests in a Node.js application, and then get to a section of the potentially very long call stack very quickly.  TraceGL even works over asynchronous events, unlike most step debuggers, which means that these operations are still shown as part of a single call stack under their originating calls, rather than as separate events.

Here is a video showing TraceGL in use:

TraceGL can instrument both browser based and Node.js applications, and integrates with various editors so that double clicking a line can open your favorite editor.  An interesting aspect of the UI is that it is written entirely using WebGL, apparently for performance reasons.  Of course, all of the text rendering (most of the UI) must have been done in a 2d canvas and then uploaded to WebGL as a texture since WebGL has no native text rendering capabilities, but clever rendering tricks like only re-rendering what has changed can make things fast.  And once the textures are on the GPU, moving them around, scaling them, etc. using shaders is very fast.

I think we’re probably going to see more and more WebGL user interfaces soon.  We’ve seen a lot of 3D stuff written on top of WebGL, and it is certainly good for that, but I’m betting that normal 2D user interfaces on the web will start being written with it too, just thanks to its great performance characteristics.  HTML and CSS is great for documents and applications, to a point, but for web apps to compete with native on performance, hardware accelerated UIs on top of WebGL will be important.

Of course, building user interfaces using WebGL means that any text rendering that is done won’t be selectable, copyable, or accessible to screen readers without lots of additional work, so I can see frameworks being developed to facilitate this.  I’ve already been working on and off on something similar to Apple’s Core Animation framework on top of WebGL (not public yet), and other interesting 2D frameworks like Pixi.js have been released recently.  Especially with WebGL’s likely support in Internet Explorer 11, I think the age of WebGL user interfaces is upon us, and it’s  exciting!

You can check out TraceGL on their website.  It costs $15 to buy, but not all good tools are free and it’s nice to support good developers, so give it a shot and let me know what you think in the comments!