Next weekend I will hold an advanced Haskell talk at the Meta Rhein-Main ChaosDays in Darmstadt. It will mostly be a guided tour through the main memory of a running Haskell program, showing how things are represented and how they change over time. For this I cannot avoid to touch the issue of garbage collection, so I created a short animation:
(If you do not see it above, then you can try on YouTube.)
It is created with Synfig, feel free to use the sources. It seems that Synfig, although it has some features that allow you to link position in various objects, or calculate with them, is not really meant for programmers. Take the arrows: They are all quite similar, and defined by starting point, end point, and how much the initial segment sticks out to the right. I could even create them so that when I move the first or last point, the rest adjusts automatically. So one would expect that I can combine these shapes in one re-usable object that has these three values as parameters, but unfortunately, that is not the case. I guess next time I want to animate something as structured as this, I use either tikz (and generate one page per frame, convert them to an image and then to a video) or a Haskell library like gloss or diagrams.
Update: I made some minor improvements to the video. Youtube does not allow me to change the video, so you’ll see the new version only here.
Have something to say? You can post a comment by sending an e-Mail to me at <mail@joachim-breitner.de>, and I will include it here.
Photos
If I get a chance I might even try replicating your animation using diagrams, it would certainly make for a nice example!