#deep-dive

reingold-tilford in o(n), the polar-coordinate variant, hyperbolic focus+context, and squarified treemaps.

cycle removal, layer assignment, crossing reduction, coordinate assignment. the pipeline behind dagre, elk, and graphviz dot.

the quadtree approximation that turned force-directed from o(n²) to o(n log n), and the coarsening trick that scales it to a million nodes.

the spring-and-charge model, the fruchterman-reingold cooling schedule, and why two runs can give two different layouts.

what graph layout is, why it's hard, and the seven families that solve it.

five targeted tricks, one for each kind of pressure the renderer faces.

the second cache that blits whole groups of elements as one image, plus the 250ms suppression window during layout bursts.

every node and edge rasterized into an offscreen atlas at 8 zoom levels, with deferred refinement.

how cytoscape stacks three canvases and only repaints the dirty ones, plus the hidden buffers behind motion blur.

the raf loop that starts once and never stops, and the priority queue that runs work between frames.