Literate Tracing with TReX

TReX is a system for literate tracing, i.e., making pretty documents out of nasty programs.

You can learn more about literate tracing in the paper about literate tracing [PDF] that I presented at Onward! 2025.

TReX is a work-in-progress. Feedback is very much welcome: email matthew@masot.net with thoughts or just to say hi!

Here I've collected some basic examples of TReX. You can find their source code here.

The HTML documents are best rendered in Firefox. Using a Chrome-based browser will probably introduce performance and rendering issues.

• Git (PDF)
• MiniSAT (HTML)
• GCC Hashmap (HTML)
• Linux RBTrees (HTML)
• tsort (PDF)
• Frequent Words (PDF)
• Frequent Words (HTML)
• Prime Generator (HTML)

If you'd like to make your own TReX documents, you should consider following these quickstarts:

• The LaTeX quickstart for making PDF traces with TReX.
• The HTML quickstart for making HTML traces with TReX.

We have also written a short literate trace of TReX itself (PDF).