SectrPrototype/Readme.md

Sectr Prototype

This prototype aims to flesh out ideas I've wanted to explore futher on code editing & related tooling.

The things to explore:

• 2D canvas for laying out code visualized in various types of ASTs
• WYSIWYG frontend ASTs
• Making AST editing as versatile as text editing.
• High-performance UI framework designed & built for AST editing.
• Generating a large amount of UI widget boxes with proper auto-layout & no perceptible rendering-lag or input lag for interactions (frametimes stable).
• Model-View-Controller interface between code managed by a 'backend' (both in memory and filesystem) and the UX composition (which has separate filesystem composition).

The project is so far in a "codebase boostrapping" phase.

The project's is organized into 2 modules sectr_host & sectr. The host module loads the main module & its memory. Hot-reloading it's dll when it detects a change.

The dependencies are:

• Odin Compiler (Slightly custom fork)
  • Added #region, #endregion directives support for editors
  • I added support for 'monlithic packages' or 'uniform-across-subdirectories packages'. It allows me to organize the main package with sub-directories.
• Odin repo's base, core, and vendor(raylib) libaries
• An ini parser
• backtrace
• Powershell (if you want to use my build scripts)

Major 'codebase modules':

• App : General app config & contextual state
• Engine : client interface for host, tick, update, rendering.
  • Has the following definitions: startup, shutdown, reload, tick, clean_frame (which host hooks up to when managing the client dll)
  • Will handle async ops.
• Font Provider : Manages fonts.
  • Bulk of visualization must be able to render text effectively
  • Going to use some form of caching.
  • Needs to be able to scale text in-realtime to linear values.
• Grime : Name speaks for itself, stuff not directly related to the target features to iterate upon for the prototype.
  • Defining dependency aliases or procedure overload tables, rolling own allocator, data structures, etc.
• Input : All human input related features
  • Base input features (polling & related) are platform abstracted from sokol_app
  • Entirely user rebindable
• Parsers
  • AST generation, editing, and serialization.
  • Parsers for different levels of "synatitic & semantic awareness", Formatting -> Domain Specific AST
  • Figure out pragmatic transformations between ASTs.
• Project : Encpasulation of user config/context/state separate from persistent app's
  • Manages the codebase (database & model view controller)
  • Manages workspaces : View compositions of the codebase
• UI : Core graphic user interface framework, AST visualzation & editing, backend visualization
  • PIMGUI (Persistent Immediate Mode User Interface)
  • Auto-layout
  • Supports heavy procedural generation of box widgets
  • Viewports
  • Docking/Tiling, Floating, Canvas

Due to the nature of the prototype there are 'sub-groups' such as the codebase being its own ordeal as well as the workspace. They'll be elaborated in their own documentation

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