# cognitive-engineering-lab/aquascope

Interactive visualizations of Rust at compile-time and run-time

Repository: https://github.com/cognitive-engineering-lab/aquascope
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/aquascope
Homepage: https://cel.cs.brown.edu/aquascope/
Language: Rust
License: MIT
License Family: permissive
Last push: 2026-05-04T03:10:25+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 76/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 80, release rhythm 58, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 1448, "days_push": 121, "days_rel": 121, "gap_med": 102, "n_releases_24m": 6}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 3131, forks 75 (observed 2026-08-28T04:07:45.512283+00:00)

## What it is
Aquascope is a tool that generates interactive visualizations of Rust programs, showing how the borrow checker reasons about permissions at compile time and how programs execute at run time. It ships as an mdBook preprocessor and a playground for exploring Rust's ownership and borrowing behavior.

## Use cases
- visualize how the Rust borrow checker analyzes my code
- show step-by-step runtime execution of a Rust program
- embed interactive Rust ownership diagrams in an mdBook
- teach Rust ownership and borrowing to students
- debug why my code fails the borrow checker
- explore permissions and boundaries in Rust programs

## When to choose
- you are writing or teaching Rust educational material with mdBook
- you want to understand or explain borrow-checker behavior visually
- you are researching Rust's compile-time and run-time semantics

## When to avoid
- you need a production-grade analysis tool for arbitrary Rust codebases
- you cannot use a specific nightly Rust toolchain
- you need visualizations for languages other than Rust

## Facets
- artifact type: application
- maturity: active
- function: developer-tools, documentation
- domain: developer-tools, education, programming-languages
- platform: rust, cli
- tags: rust, borrow-checker, visualization, mdbook, compiler-internals, research-software, miri, education, web-server

## Member repositories
- cognitive-engineering-lab/aquascope (main) score 76

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:07:45.512283+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T07:26:09.209584+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/cognitive-engineering-lab/aquascope (fetched 2026-08-28T04:07:45.512283+00:00, sha ae2ac5b155de)
  - homepage: https://cel.cs.brown.edu/aquascope/ (fetched 2026-08-29T09:40:58.750418+00:00, sha 01c3d8039b17)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.