On the Implementation of Dynamic Visualizations
Andrés M. Garced, Tijana Minić, Marco T. Morazán · 2024
The use of visualization tools to instruct Computer Science students on dynamic processes has a long and successful history.Unlike most articles on visualization tools, that often only focus on classroom experiences, this articles focuses on implementation features that are important to make the user's and the developer's experience pleasant and smooth.To create such an experience for the user, dynamic visualizations need a fast start-up time and a fast response time to user interactions.Factors that impact the user experience include start-up time, demand for volatile memory, and interference from a garbage collector.Presented empirical results suggest using restricted parallelism to generate images, using thunks to represent images at runtime, and not requesting more frequent incremental collections.To create such an experience for the developer, the amount of repeated code needs to be minimal.To this end, the article describes a macro-based abstraction to generate event handlers.