Okay. That said, are there any particular conclusions or implications from this approach for that use case?
For that matter, are you next going to extend this simple exploration toward more complexity (eg. more widget types, more interactions, more layout constraints, etc.) or toward more data?
As I've followed your efforts in this area, the power and utility of selecting the right motivating example has been coming into focus. The parallels with a startup's MVP are fairly clear, the parallels to selecting a (dissertation) research topic a bit handwavy (in part because guidelines for the latter are extraordinarily vague). So far you haven't really chosen a new motivating end-user application since suspending development of Xi. There are lots of directions you could go, from making an equivalent to Processing, to creating a game engine, or eventually restarting Xi development with an eye toward exploration and visualization of large codebases, etc. Personally I'm starting to become intrigued by the need to dig into large neural nets and the representations encoded within (related subtopics: latent spaces, feature vectors, orthogonality):
Meanwhile, I've been casting about for a proper (Rust) motivating example app/library of my own, and the closest I've come so far is something like a HTML + CSS rendering engine, though not targeted at the Web per-se, but instead at ebooks (esp. EPUB), a much smaller set of required functionality.
In theory a desktop ebook library + reader app with features like MathML support, advanced typography, and visualizing connections between millions of works and annotations seems like it would be a better fit with the direction you're (currently) going than any existing framework.
For that matter, are you next going to extend this simple exploration toward more complexity (eg. more widget types, more interactions, more layout constraints, etc.) or toward more data?
As I've followed your efforts in this area, the power and utility of selecting the right motivating example has been coming into focus. The parallels with a startup's MVP are fairly clear, the parallels to selecting a (dissertation) research topic a bit handwavy (in part because guidelines for the latter are extraordinarily vague). So far you haven't really chosen a new motivating end-user application since suspending development of Xi. There are lots of directions you could go, from making an equivalent to Processing, to creating a game engine, or eventually restarting Xi development with an eye toward exploration and visualization of large codebases, etc. Personally I'm starting to become intrigued by the need to dig into large neural nets and the representations encoded within (related subtopics: latent spaces, feature vectors, orthogonality):
https://distill.pub/2019/activation-atlas/
Meanwhile, I've been casting about for a proper (Rust) motivating example app/library of my own, and the closest I've come so far is something like a HTML + CSS rendering engine, though not targeted at the Web per-se, but instead at ebooks (esp. EPUB), a much smaller set of required functionality.
In theory a desktop ebook library + reader app with features like MathML support, advanced typography, and visualizing connections between millions of works and annotations seems like it would be a better fit with the direction you're (currently) going than any existing framework.