glimmer

README

Glimmer

A Go tool that visualizes the communication between goroutines

Glimmer works by modifying the AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) of the program that you provide it with. It then compiles this modified copy of your program (it won't change the actual code, don't worry) and runs it. The modifications that Glimmer did in the first step will send all the messages that are being send by channels, that are in a tracked functions, to a front-end that will display this messages nicely.

Installation

go get golang.org/x/tools/cmd/goimports

go get github.com/mzdravkov/glimmer

How to use it

Glimmer is pretty simple and straight forward. All you need to do is to annotate the functions that you want to examine with this special comment:

// glimmer

Once you've finished annotating, you just run the glimmer command-line tool and provide it with the path to the program:

glimmer on /path/to/the/program

Voila!

Front-end

When Glimmer runs it starts a web server listening on port 9610. Just open localhost:9610 to start watching the visualization of your goroutines communicating. When Glimmer starts your program it will block the execution until you start it from the front end. This is done in order to not miss the beginning of your program's visualization. This behaviour can be altered by providing a --no-wait flag.

Flags

--no-wait            disables the initial block that stops the program until you start it from the front-end
--port 10000         changes the default port of the web server that powers the front-end
--log /path/to/file  logs the JSON that is used for communication between the back-end and the front-end
--no-front-end       disables the server that powers the front-end
--delay 1000         sets the default delay for messages in milliseconds
--sequentialize      sets the default mode to sequential
--examine-all        visualizes all goroutines, not just the ones that are annotated

State

Glimmer is in a very early state and it's still quite nonfunctional

License

Apache License Version 2.0, January 2004

See the LICENSE document in the project tree root for details.