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VegaProf: Profiling Vega Visualizations by Yang, Junran; Bäuerle, Alex; Moritz, Dominik; Demiralp, Çağatay is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is VegaProf: Profiling Vega Visualizations about?

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) for visualization aim to facilitate visualization creation by providing abstractions that offload implementation and execution details from users to the system layer. Therefore, DSLs often execute user-defined specifications by transforming them into intermediate representations (IRs) in successive lowering operations. However, DSL-specified visualizations can be difficult to profile and, hence, optimize due to the layered abstractions. To better understand visualization profiling workflows and challenges, we conduct formative interviews with visualization engineers who use Vega in production. Vega is a popular visualization DSL that transforms specifications into dataflow graphs, which are then executed to render visualization primitives. Our formative interviews reveal that current developer tools are ill-suited for visualization profiling since they are disconnected from the semantics of Vega's specification and its IRs at runtime. To address this gap, we introduce VegaProf, the first performance profiler for Vega visualizations. VegaProf instruments the Vega library by associating a declarative specification with its compilation and execution. I

Author

Yang, Junran; Bäuerle, Alex; Moritz, Dominik; Demiralp, Çağatay

Published

2022

Language

EN