[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: vacuum-cairo: a cairo frontend to vacuum for live Haskell data visualization

[Don Stewart]

I am pleased to announce the release of vacuum-cairo, a Haskell library
for interactive rendering and display of values on the GHC heap using
Matt Morrow's vacuum library.

This library takes vacuum's output, generates dot graph format from it,
renders it to SVG with graphviz, and displays the resulting structure
using the gtk2hs Cairo vector graphics bindings ... all at the GHCi
command line.

This tool is useful for examining Haskell data structures as they are
represented directly in the heap. In particular, it makes sharing visible for
the first time, as well as unboxed values. It should be useful for
teaching Haskell, or for library authors debugging the design of their
data structures.

You can see pictures of the rendered display here:

    http://code.haskell.org/~dons/images/vacuum/intmap.png

And youtube screencasts of vacuum-cairo in action:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oujaqo9GAmA

Get it:

    cabal install vacuum-cairo

And on Hackage:

    http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/vacuum-cairo

-- Don