Networked Systems, System Trees, Dependency Chains

[marcgehman]

Hello, I've been experimenting with this library for a little while now, really impressed with all of the features and capabilities. It's also been a great resource for me to learn Nim's meta programming.

For our project, defining the order of execution is important. We need to construct networks, trees or chains of Systems.
We could do this with groups, as discussed in https://github.com/rlipsc/polymorph/issues/11, however I feel this library could benefit from more expanded support.

Basically, the idea is to extend the concept of Groups to a more Network-based structure. There are methods which I have seen used in digital synthesizer applications to structure a network into a tree structure, resolving feedback cycles within the network. This, coupled with Polymorph's ECS model, could create a very general, powerful computational model.

We could build our own abstractions on top of Polymorph to achieve this, but it would be nicer if this were more natively integrated.

I was curious if you see this as a natural extension to the current Polymorph model, etc. Let me know your thoughts, would love to collaborate with you to implement something like this.

Thanks,
Marc

[rlipsc]

Hi @marcgehman,

Hello, I've been experimenting with this library for a little while now, really impressed with all of the features and capabilities. It's also been a great resource for me to learn Nim's meta programming.

Thanks for the kind words! I feel the internals could be due for a bit of clean up as the library's evolved over time along with the language (and my experience), but it's good to hear it's useful as a reference point for Nim's metaprogramming.

For our project, defining the order of execution is important. We need to construct networks, trees or chains of Systems.
I feel this library could benefit from more expanded support.
Basically, the idea is to extend the concept of Groups to a more Network-based structure. There are methods which I have seen used in digital synthesizer applications to structure a network into a tree structure, resolving feedback cycles within the network.

This is sounds very interesting, and I agree it would be nice to have better ordering support.

The ECS does have some dependency tracking already in terms of tracking reads and writes to components within systems at compile time, with the future goal of automatically threading non-interacting systems. This could be built upon to output non-dependent execution trees.

Are you considering using Polymorph for synthesizer stuff, or are you just interested in applying those kind of principles to system ordering? I can see how this could be useful for ML stuff as well, and of course gamedev.

Is this something you're thinking can set up and control system ordering at run time, compile time, or both? What kind of dependency constraints are you interested in?

This, coupled with Polymorph's ECS model, could create a very general, powerful computational model.

Yes! This aligns well with my original goal for Polymorph to be a composable, data-oriented computation platform.

I was curious if you see this as a natural extension to the current Polymorph model, etc. Let me know your thoughts, would love to collaborate with you to implement something like this.

Definitely! I'd love to hear more about what you envisage for system networks. I have some time to work on the library over the next week, and hopefully soon will be getting more time in general to contribute to it.