animated gifs of (sorting) algorithms

What is the best way to generate gifs of algorithms like this one in Wikipedia? I开发者_运维技巧n Linux, any language really.

ImageMagick can construct animations by assembling several bitmaps into one:

convert -delay 100 \
      -page first.gif \
      -page second.gif \
      -page third.gif \
      -loop 0  animation.gif

There are probably more user-friendly ways, but last time I did this, I used gifsicle to assemble some pre-built frames into an animation.

It is also possible to generate animated gifs with Gimp if you prefer a GUI tool. Plenty of how-to's if you google it.