Data engines

goofi has three engines, and each runs its nodes by different rules: what triggers a node, how fast it runs, and what language it is written in. Every node belongs to one engine, and so does every data type.

Signal engine

The signal engine is for signal processing. It is event driven: a producer node sends a data packet downstream, and each packet that arrives triggers the receiving node to process the new data. Nodes run asynchronously, each on its own thread and at its own rate, so a slow analysis never holds up a fast stream. It supports Python and Rust nodes.

Audio engine

The audio engine is for sound. It is clock driven: the sound device asks for one block of 64 samples at a time, and every node in the graph processes that block in turn, in topological order on a single thread, so the whole graph runs in lockstep at the device’s sample rate. It supports Rust nodes and VST3 plugins, and a signal crosses into it through a bridge node such as SignalIn.

Graphics engine

The graphics engine is for images. It is frame driven: a clock ticks 30 times a second, and on each tick the whole graph renders once on the GPU, node after node, into shared textures. A node is a WGSL fragment shader, or a Rust or Python producer that uploads pixels for the shaders to work on. A signal comes in through ArrayIn, as pixels, a line plot or a trajectory.