Representing Julia expressions AST using a directed graph

Specific Domains Visualization
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1

My graph should represent the AST of Julia expressions like y = x + 10/a for instance; there is a catch though, these ys and xs are not just mere numbers; they are custom types (wrappers) that hold, among other things, numeric values.

I want my graph to also represent the label of the object x, which also holds a value, say 8.0

2

Maybe GraphMakie.jl can help you here. If you have the associated DAG, you could just set the labels.

3

could you please point out to an example or a documentation link? I looked into the docs, but didn’t find a simple use case

4

By the way, I expect it to look like:

a|data: 8.0 -------> b|data: 5.0

5

Does this help?

julia> using SimpleExpressions, AbstractTrees

julia> @symbolic x y;

julia> expression = 2*x + 3*x*y
(2 * x) + (y * (3 * x))

julia> print_tree(expression)
+
├─ *
│  ├─ 2
│  └─ x
└─ *
   ├─ y
   └─ *
      ├─ 3
      └─ x

On Slack I recommended other solutions, but now it seems that you just want a visualization of the tree?

BTW, if you take a look at the AbstractTrees.jl documentation, it points to D3Trees.jl, which can visualize the expression tree in a more graphic and interactive manner.

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6

thank you, this is the closest to what I’m looking for:

image
(from Deep Neural Networks As Computational Graphs | by Tyler Elliot Bettilyon | Teb’s Lab | Medium)

I don’t care too much about the style of the graph as long as I have control over the nodes’ display (meaning, I can customize the information to be displayed on each node)… like an “AST weighted computational graph”

Hopefully, that makes sense

7

For really fine control over labels attached to each node and edge, a tool you may consider is GraphViz, which can allow for fairly complex types of information to be included in each node (tables, for example Node Shapes | Graphviz).There is a graphviz_jll package that you could use to link to it.

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8

Thank you.

I spent a lot of time looking into different libraries; I decided to use Graphviz but through Python using PyCall, because the Julia version is not maintained anymore (for at least a couple of years).

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9

Personally I wouldn’t bother with any library bindings, instead I’d just generate the graph descriptions as text.

FTR, alternatives to Graphviz include:

BTW, a fun fact that I think not many people know, is that AFAIK Graphviz originated at Bell Labs together with Unix and other things.

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