VegaProf: Profiling Vega Visualizations
Junran Yang, Alex B\"auerle, Dominik Moritz, \c{C}a\u{g}atay, Demiralp

TL;DR
VegaProf is a novel performance profiler for Vega visualizations that helps users understand and optimize visualization performance across multiple abstraction levels by integrating with the Vega library.
Contribution
It introduces VegaProf, the first profiler for Vega, enabling interactive performance analysis at function, dataflow, and specification levels.
Findings
VegaProf improves the tractability of visualization profiling.
It provides actionable insights through interactive performance probing.
Feedback indicates VegaProf aids visualization engineers in optimization tasks.
Abstract
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…
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Taxonomy
TopicsScientific Computing and Data Management · Software System Performance and Reliability · Model-Driven Software Engineering Techniques
