Ownership and Lifetime Visualization Tool

187 points cordx56 40 comments

I have developed a VSCode extension called RustOwl that visualizes ownership-related operations and variable lifetimes using colored underlines. I believe it can be especially helpful for both debugging and optimization.

https://github.com/cordx56/rustowl

I'm not aware of any other practical visualization tool that supports NLL (RustOwl uses the Polonius API!) and can be used for code that depends on other crates.

In fact, I used RustOwl to optimize itself by visualizing Mutex lock objects, I was able to spot some inefficient code.

Visualization of Mutex lock object

What do you think of this tool? Do you have any suggestions for improvement? Any comments are welcome!