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).
sectr_host_2025-01-04_20-25-56.mp4
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.
- Added the ability to debug using statements on structs (fields get dumped to the stack as ptr refs)
- Remove implicit assignments for container allocators in the Base and Core packages
- I did not enjoy bug hunting a memory corruption because I mistakenly didn't properly initialize a core container with their designated initiatizer: new, make, or init.
- See fork Readme for which procedures were changed..
- Odin repo's base, core, and vendor(raylib) libaries
- An ini parser
- backtrace (not used yet)
- freetype (not used yet)
- harfbuzz
- sokol
- sokol-tools
- Powershell (if you want to use my build scripts)
The project is so far in a "codebase boostrapping" phase. Most the work being done right now is setting up high performance linear zoom rendering for text and UI.
The project's is organized into 2 runtime modules sectr_host & sectr. The host module loads the main module & its memory. Hot-reloading it's dll when it detects a change.
Codebase organization:
- App: General app config, state, and operations.
- 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
- Bulk of implementation maintained as a separate library: VEFontCache-Odin
- 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
- Math: The usual for 2D/3D.
- 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
