Developer Rick Arends has created a 3D visualizer that turns millions of lines of code into a three-dimensional space that you can "fly" through.
Developer Rick Arends has created a 3D visualizer that turns millions of lines of code into a three-dimensional space that you can "fly" through.
Tom's Hardware tells about this.
Ironed out the last performance issues with my full 2.5 m line codebase explorer. 120hz awesomeness. Can only upload 60fps video tho. Much nicer uncompressed pic.twitter.com/LUsrmVaI6L
— Rik Arends (@rikarends) September 12, 2026
In Arends' video, you can see huge canvases of code hanging in 3D space. The user can move between them, fly closer and read individual fragments. According to Arends, the X network can only publish videos at a frequency of 60 FPS, although the visualizer itself, he claims, works at a frequency of more than 120 frames per second.
Initially, this effect came at a cost in RAM. A 2.5 million row visualizer took up about 21 GB of RAM. After adding indexes and stream compression, Arends reduced that to about 3.5 GB, and says that's not the limit of optimization.
He didn't stop at 2.5 million lines either. The developer tried loading the entire Chromium source code tree into the visualizer — about 51 million lines. According to him, the system managed it in about 60 seconds.
To avoid having to simultaneously hold millions of lines of code in memory and display them in detail, Arends arranged for the necessary data to be loaded gradually. The system stores some of the information on disk, and code that is far from the user can be displayed in less detail.
This way, the visualizer doesn't have to process the entire huge code base at once. This significantly reduces the memory load.
Arends admits that the practical utility of this format is limited. However, users are already suggesting adding visualizations of dependencies between parts of a project or showing how the code has changed over time. Then the “flight” could help not only admire the codebase, but also understand it.
A similar idea is already used in CodeCharta, where the code base is transformed into a kind of 3D city: files become buildings, and their parameters can show the size, complexity, and other characteristics of the code. However, there is no possibility to "fly" past millions of lines there.
Arends wants to eventually turn his visualizer into a product and sell it for a small fee. And when asked why he created it in the first place, his answer was simple: “because I could.”
Previously, dev.ua also wrote about Relia — a tool that visualizes the structure of a codebase and shows the connections and data flows between its parts. Unlike Arends' experiment, visualization there has a more practical purpose — to help developers understand the logic of the system.
