He was so preoccupied about whether he could, he didn't stop to think about whether he should.
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Ironed out the last performance issues with my full 2.5m line codebase explorer. 120hz awesomeness. Can only upload 60fps video tho. Much nicer uncompressed pic.twitter.com/LUsrmVaI6L September 12, 2026
Although the published video is only at 60 FPS due to X's limitation, the navigation looks smooth indeed, and it's impressive to see all the actual source code in a reasonably readable manner. Arends says the visualization initially took 21 GB of RAM (in this economy?!), but that after judicious application of indexes and streaming compression, he got memory usage down to a much more palatable 3.5 GB. Although he remarked that he's yet to fully optimize the visualizer, he did try to load Chromium's entire source tree (51 million lines) in only 60 seconds at one point.
While one can argue that the 3D visualization of the code itself is probably really fun to look at, its practical use is also questionable, at least as-is. A commenter remarked that adding a time element would help immensely, by displaying changes to the source files. 3D tracking of dependencies would probably be handy, too. There's already an actual full-fledged commercial tool called CodeCharta that visualizes changes and hotspots in 3D, though the flybys aren't quite as impressive.
Arends says that he intends to turn this visualization tool into a product and charge a small fee for it, though he admits that the usefulness of the visualization may be limited. When asked why he created this, he simply said, "because I could." The jury is still out on whether he should.
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Mind-bending self-replicating GIF code prints an exact copy of itself, is both a program and its own visual output
Walk through a 3D cyberpunk city built purely from ASCII characters
Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/developer-builds-viral-3d-source-code-visualizer-that-consumes-21gb-of-ram-flies-around-2-5-million-lines-of-code-at-over-120-frames-per-second#main
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