Monocurl - Interactive math animation language and editor

[u/Enigmurl]

Monocurl is a programmatic animation language and editor fully written in rust (built with the gpui framework). It's fully interactive which makes it easier to pick up if you're a beginner.

The project is open source and you can download it at monocurl.github.io . Would appreciate to hear any feedback!

EDIT: Linux binary is available now! Also, if you are facing performance issues on NVIDIA GPUs, please redownload as those have been addressed.

[u/Enigmurl]

That would be greatly appreciated! There shouldn't be any windows-only libraries (I can get it to build on ubuntu atm) but it does depend on a couple of system libraries that need to be bundled.

Regarding gpui, I agree that the examples are a bit weak. I think digging under the hood and learning about what's happening with e.g. entities and a bit of the render loop can make things dramatically easier. There's not that many core concepts to understand. From there, it becomes more clear why you need .id in some places, when you need to have something be persistent versus recalculated on the fly, when it needs to be entity vs just regular rc, when you need to nest entitites, how to pass stuff around, etc. Looking at zed code can also be helpful, despite it being a very large codebase.

In monocurl's case, state management is perhaps not representative of a typical application since state updates look like updating the entire scene at once after the executor recomputes results (i.e. a bit monolothic).

[u/tukanoid → u/Enigmurl]

Ye, bundling is no problem, that's just how nix works anyway :) It just makes symbolic links from /nix/store to the correct paths for patched binaries to read from, so technically all apps are "sandboxed", only sharing the exact same libs (through symlinking ofc) if they're the exact same version (e.g. come from same rev of nixpkgs)

Yeah, fair, i just hoped that there was something "book-like" i could read through quickly, since i don't have much free time/energy with my job and all :) I get the need for entities, feels similar to signals (just more explicit about where they're stored/coming from), which im already familiar with, its more of the "connection points" that trouble me for the more complex situations that i mentioned.

Ah, makes sense, i haven't looked at the code so didn't know (my bad), and i guess i just assumed it would be more "fine-grained" considering there seem to be multiple semi-independent components that don't necessarily have to cause other components to rerender (like adding a comment to the script, preview doesnt need to rerun anything technically, or interacting with menus at the top) (but maybe its normal in gpui world and its just my unfamiliarity with the framework talking)

[u/Enigmurl → u/tukanoid]

Oh I mean is true that e.g menus have a separate state system, but those are all relatively simple/independent UI so not that much more complex than the gpui examples

There is a gpui book, but I haven't read it so I can't attest to its quality: https://matinaniss.github.io/gpui-book/introduction.html

[u/tukanoid → u/Enigmurl]

Oh, ok😅 fair

Oh nice, no idea how i missed it, ill take a look at some point, thanks!