Recruiting Contributors

[psionic-k]

In addition to this, see module comments and DEBT.md. The scope of DEBT.md is constrained to only talk about things that exist and are costing us interest the more we keep doing new things that way.

Wayland

If you are already using Wayland as a daily driver, please work on the surface creation. I need to install a Wayland DE to finish work on it, but pipewire on Linux already works, so you literally only need to finish the surface and we will have great support on Linux.

Hardware Dependent Work

• Apple hardware
  • surface creation
  • CPAL or Apple audio lib
  • Use the slang compiler to target Metal Shader Language
    • Compiles to a metallib
    • Needs loading support via assets module. Recently learned of magic values we can set inside the binary that enables the MoltenVk layer to directly used compiled MSL inside VkShaderModuleCreateInfo calls. It says to prepend the magic value to the null-terminated compiled MSL. The descriptor-to-argument-buffer agreement is not automatic and we must do some introspection (invoke slangc with extra options) to tweak our Vulkan calls so that the MSL layout matches how our Vulkan calls are translated.
• Windows
  • CPAL or windows audio lib integration
  • Surface creation
  • Asset lookups, maybe platform independent path slashiness
• Andoid
  • NDK build of Rust applications
    • Audio output monitoring permissions
  • Surface creation
  • CPAL or Android NDK sound integration
  • Input integration
• Variable Rate Monitors
  • Need free-sync (Adaptive Sync) monitor
  • Clean up fixed-rate-rendering (FRR) debt (greatly improved)
  • Try to present at a user-configurable target rate
  • Slow down if frames begin to drop or deadlines are missed
  • Generalize support for measuring and communicating timing data around

Harder Pioneering Work

"Pioneering" meaning probably nothing is done and not much prior art exists.

• Engineering the DFT filter banks onto the GPU (already the focus right now)
• Resource hydration, ownership, lifecycle, reactively updating dependents
• Render crossfading, smoothly changing render techniques while aliasing buffers and interleaving modulated draw commands
• Shader & pipeline type agreement via slang introspection & macros
• Rendering things that haven't been demonstrated yet like large numbers of particles or ray tracing

Maturity Focused Work

• Compressing Vulkan boilerplate into a DSL / subset we actually use
• Build the Node Link and input selection in pipewire so we can possibly obtain presentation timing data and use it to fully align visual and audio or select different inputs, such as the microphone or a single application
• Audio rate and channel handling generalization
• Alternative frontend similar to scope-tui
  • prelude to talking to other LEDs and things
• Multiple monitor support for "fullscreen"

Good First Issue Work

• User configurations loaded from dotfiles
• Begin support for interchangeable "visuals" and add triangle support back as a runtime configuration option
• Build some smaller modular filter banks using simple bandpasses to give us a simple compute shader
• Move more things into lib since the current visualizer crate will be just a frontend later
• The DSP workbench tool has many unfinished commands with unfinished options. More commands could have a lot of engineering value, such as verifying the maximum gain and bandwidth symmetry. Noise floor isn't implemented at all.