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.
go get golang.org/x/tools/cmd/goimports
go get github.com/mzdravkov/glimmer
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!
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.
--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
Glimmer is in a very early state and it's still quite nonfunctional
Apache License Version 2.0, January 2004
See the LICENSE document in the project tree root for details.