gantz

A crate for creating and evaluating executable directed graphs at runtime. In other words, gantz allows users to compose programs described by interconnected nodes on the fly.

Gantz is inspired by a desire for a more flexible, high-performance, open-source alternative to graphical programming environments such as Max/MSP, Touch Designer, Houdini and others. ^{Named after gantz graf.}

NOTE: gantz is currently a research project and is not ready for any kind of real-world use.

Design Overview

Gantz allows for constructing executable directed graphs by composing together Nodes.

Nodes are a way to allow users to abstract and encapsulate logic into smaller, re-usable components, similar to a function in a coded programming language.

Every Node is made up of the following:

• Any number of inputs, where each input is of some rust type or generic type.
• Any number of outputs, where each output is of some rust type or generic type.
• An expression or function that takes the inputs as arguments and returns the outputs in a tuple.

Graphs describe the composition of one or more nodes. A graph may contain one or more nested graphs represented as nodes, forming the main method of abstraction within gantz.

A Project provides an API for easily creating graphs, compiling them into Rust dynamic libraries and loading them ready for evaluation, all at runtime. The project manages a single cargo workspace that contains a single crate for each graph.

See the gantz/tests directory for some very basic, early proof-of-concept tests.

Included Crates

gantz_core

Contains the core traits and items necessary for any gantz implementation. The current approach heavily revolves around rust-code generation, however this crate may get generalised in the future to allow for more easily targeting other languages.

gantz

Provides implementations for the core traits and a high-level Project API for convenient use.

This repo does not provide any GUI itself - this will likely be implemented in a separate repository using nannou.

Goals

• A simple function for creating nodes from rust expressions.
• Allow for handling generics and trait objects within custom nodes.
• Serialize and Deserialize for nodes and graphs via serde and typetag.
• Project workspace creation.
• Push evaluation through the graph.
• Pull evaluation through the graph.
• Simultaneous push and pull evaluation from multiple nodes.
• Stateless node codegen.
• Stateful node codegen.
• Implement Node for Graph.
• Conditional evaluation #21.
• Evaluation boundaries #22.
• Dynamic node I/O configurations #31.
• A convenient API for managing node state #44.
• A way to easily generate node types from existing fns in other crates.

After each of these goals are met, a new repository will be created where gantz will be extended using nannou to provide higher-level tools including:

• A GUI for creating, editing and saving graphs and custom nodes at runtime.
• Node packaging and sharing tools, likely built on cargo and crates.io.
• A suite of nodes providing an interface to nannou's cross-platform support for a wide range of protocols and I/O:
  • Windowing and input events.
  • Phasers and signals.
  • Audio input, output, processing and device management.
  • 2D/3D geometry, graphics and shaders.
  • Video input and processing.
  • Networking (UDP and TCP).
  • OSC.
  • Lighting, lasers & control: DMX (via sACN), CITP (& CAEX), Ether-Dream.
  • GPU general compute.
  • General file reading and writing.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contributions

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.