As with many things, there seems to be an obvious convergent design
philosophy here wrt. data flow.
We should definitely be using `SimSymbol` for a lot more things; it
solves a lot of the pain points related to figuring out what on Earth
should go into the `InfoFlow` in which situations.
We desperately need to iron out the `*Flow` object semantics
The surprise MVP of the day is `Polars`.
What a gorgeous and fast dataframe library.
We initially wrote it off as being unsuited to multidimensional data,
but case in point, a whole lot of useful data can indeed be expressed as 2D.
For all of these cases, be it loading/saving or processing, `Polars`
is truly an ideal choice.
Work continues.
BLField has gotten a huge facelift, to make it practical to wrangle
properties without the sharp edges.
- All the "special" UI-exposed property types can now be directly
constructed in a BLField marked with 'prop_ui'.
- The most appropriate internal representation will be chosen to
represent the attribute based on its type annotation, including sized
vector-like `bool`, `int`, `float` for `tuple[...]`.
- Static EnumProperties can now be derived from a special `StrEnum`, to
which a `to_name` and `to_icon` method is attached.
- Dynamic `EnumProperty` can now be used safely, with builtin
workarounds to the real-world reference-loss-crash (realized
in the Tidy3D Cloud Task node) and jankiness like empty enum.
- The update method is now fully managed, negating all bugs related to
improper update callback naming.
- Python-side getter caching is preserved for ui-exposed
properties, with the help of node/socket base class support for
passing a `Signal.InvalidateCache` to BLFields that are altered in the
UI.
The cost to all this niceness is rather low, and arguably, positive:
- Dynamic Enum/String searchers no longer "magically" invoke all the
time, since the values seen by Blender are cached by the BLField.
- To regenerate the searcher output, an `@on_value_changed` should be
made by the user to pass `Signal.ResetEnumItems` or
`Signal.ResetStrSearch` to the `BLField`.
- Since searching is no longer eager, there is no danger of
out-of-reference strings (which crash Blender from EnumProperty), but
also a greatly reduced performance problems associated with
the hot-loop regeneration of EnumProperty strings.
- The base classes are now involved with BLField invalidation, to ensure
that the getter caches are cleared up when the UI changes. For the
price of that small indirection (done cheaply with set lookup),
all attribute lookups are generally done in a single lookup, completely
avoiding Blender until needed.
- This does represent another increase in confidence wrt. the event
system's integrity, but so far, that has been a very productive
direction.
**NOTE**: The entire feature set of BLField is not well tested, and will
likely need adjustments as the codebase is converted to use them.
We have a far more sane approach to nodeps now, which
allows us to essentially have two loggers - one that is
very useful, pretty, and clear, but requires a 'rich'
dependency, and one that is simple.
In this spirit, we factored out services/ too.
We can also set the initial console log level now when
packing the .zip.
There's still work to do with the actual flow for deps
installing / uninstalling.
But it should be far more robust now.
Finally, we have a barebones working `quartodoc`-based docs site.
It's super clever; see <https://github.com/machow/quartodoc>.
As it's "just" a quarto project with some python autodiscovery,
fleshing it out with ex. math, images, diagrams, and so forth
should be exceptionally easy.
As we develop, various linter-guided fixes are being realized.
This will be a long process, best done as we spiff everything up
in preparation for general release.
