pineal/README.md

pineal

Backend-agnostic visualization — the "third eye". A catalog of GPU painters over a single Canvas trait, in Rust, on Llimphi.

pineal is a catalog of specialized painters — cartesian, polar, mesh, treemap, phosphor, flow, heatmap, stream, financial, hexbin, contour, bars — over one painter abstraction, the Canvas trait. Any program can push shapes to a pineal and get pixels without carrying its own graphics stack. The whole chain core → render → painter is agnostic of the backend: the same painter draws to vello/Llimphi on screen, to software PNG/SVG/PDF offline, or straight to the GPU for millions of primitives.

pineal does not compute — it only draws. Simulation lives elsewhere; pineal turns the output into pixels. It's the hammer, not the carpenter.

_{a montage of real painters — bars · heatmap · contour · polar · treemap · candlesticks · Sankey · force graph}

Quick start — the gallery

cargo run --release -p pineal-galeria-demo   # 11 painters tiled in one window
cargo run --release -p pineal-gpu-demo       # 3D starfield, up to 1M primitives/frame (D = density, space = pause)

Each painter also has its own demo: pineal-{heatmap,hexbin,treemap,mesh,financial,flow,contour,bars,polar,phosphor,stream}-demo.

Crates

pineal-core (agnostic primitives: interleaved DataBuffer, streaming RingBuffer, SpatialIndex, LTTB, scales — zero UI deps, zero alloc in the hot path) · pineal-render · one crate per painter · pineal (umbrella re-export for prototyping; in production import the leaf crates so tree-shaking drops the unused).

How dependencies work

This is a clean, light front-door: pineal's only external dependency is the Llimphi UI framework, pulled as a git dependency. No monorepo clone, no vendoring — pineal-core/render are backend-agnostic and the on-screen path is the only one that touches Llimphi.

License

MIT. Builds on Llimphi.