Visa Viz

Twitter thread explorer made in C++/Wasm/WebGL

Once upon a time, I stumbled upon @visakanv's network of threads, but it was too cumbersome to explore through the official clients. This web app allows to browse the whole network, it walks and quacks like a web app but is built with as little HTML/JS/CSS as possible (currently around 3%), using C++/Wasm/WebGL instead. It serves 2000 threads, 18000 tweets and about as much text as "War and Peace" novel.

You can try it out at https://visa-viz.ilidemi.com.

Controls: pan with RMB, zoom with Ctrl +/-, button in the corner teleports you to a random thread.

Building and running locally

This repo has a mock set of threads that illustrates every type of tweet that is supported without having you to download gigabytes of real data.

• Install and activate Emscripten 2.0.31+
• Update paths in scripts/build.ps1
• Install PowerShell - it runs on macOS and Linux too. Version 5.1 bundled with Windows 10 is good enough.
• Run ./build_mock.ps1
• Run ./host.ps1
• Play with it at http://localhost:8000

Running tests

• Install WASI SDK 12+
• Install Wasmtime 0.30+
• On Windows, install VS C++ 2015 Redistributable if you don't have it
• Update paths in test.ps1
• Run ./test.ps1

Setting up VS Code

• Update .vscode/c_cpp_properties.json to point it to your C++ compiler
• If using PowerShell bundled with Windows, replace pwsh with powershell in .vscode/tasks.json

Features that could've been but aren't

• Text tracking/kerning
• Smooth zoom
• Clickable links
• Context menus
• Full text search
• Displaying everything at once