REVIS: An Error Visualization Tool for Rust
summary
A VSCode extension visualizes lifetime-related Rust compiler errors as SVG line decorations showing regions for lifetimes, arrows for moves/borrows, and textual tips. Implementation parses rust-analyzer output and currently supports 8 lifetime error codes. A small study with 6 participants collecting ~6,000 commits and ~15,000 error instances finds REVIS produces 51 visualized cases (~0.3%) that nevertheless take about 10× longer to fix than typical errors.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:12Rust memory safety
- 4:30Limitations of Rust tools
- 6:59Revis visualization tool
- 8:49Revis demo in VS Code
- 9:33Revis visualization components
- 11:23Revis as VS Code extension
- 12:50User study design
- 15:25User study findings
- 17:33Q&A
- 20:23Visualization design limits
- 23:24Closing
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