Summer review 2026

This page is meant to help us assess our progress over fiscal year 2026 (July 2025 through June 2026). It has a section for each of the goals we set out in our spring 2025 tech demo, as well as sections for classifying work that doesn't directly support these goals. I've glanced through all of the pull requests and issues from the review period (#92 through #161) and sorted each one in the section for the goal or other work that it most directly supports.

Narrow goals

Make the engine more robust

Pull requests

#136 Properly implement Ueda and Yamashita's regularized Newton's method

Wiki edits

Algebraic constraint-solving, revisions 46565fa756 through 44fb0ef2ed
Numerical optimization, revisions 3aa5614f8b through 23610510b6

Experimental branches

Trying out an alternate configuration space metric, as described in issue #131, on the Vectornaut:grad-norm-reg branch
Playing with regularization methods on @Vectornaut local branches like qr-alg-tinkering, lanczos-tinkering, mod-cholesky-tinkering, and nearby

Issues

#104 (not reproduced) Tridiminished icosahedron: line search failed
#130 (addressed) Properly implement Ueda and Yamashita's regularized Newton method
#131 Use a more meaningful metric on the configuration space

Expand our corpus of test problems

Pull requests

#103 Add more test assemblies

Wiki edits

Test problems, revisions 1f9d5783ed through 77ed911639

To support engine testing, improve the interface as needed

Pull requests

#92 feat: Engine diagnostics
#114 Rewind through the descent history
#133 Prototype a command terminal
#138 feat: Introduce an action system and command language
#148 Add descriptor details to the command language
#155 Polish behavior and code in the action system
#169 (open) Move the command language interpretation system into its own module
#161 Correct the rest of the test assembly loading scripts

Issues

#106 Add tangent space determiners to the diagnostics panel
#107 Restore the invalid regulator input indicator for elements
#115 Give feedback for blocked manipulation
#123 Graceful realization failure

Broad goals

Explore the "island of usefulness" of our current engine approach

Pull requests

#118 feat: Point coordinate regulators

Experimental branches

Seeking and measuring 5-5-4 near-miss acrohedra for the Impossolid exhibit on Vectornaut:near-miss and nearby branches

Issues

#119 Derived quantities
#121 Lines and circles

Either find some of the island's boundaries or show that it covers a large swath of interesting problems

This goal still seems pretty far away.

Goals outside the road map

Formatting

Pull requests

#108 Add trailing commas and clean up formatting
#111 simplify-names
#126 (closed) noTrailingWhitespace
#128 chore: wrap at 80 characters
#129 chore: Remove trailing whitespace

Issues

#99 (addressed) Switch to using trailing commas
#112 80-character line length?
#137 Use underscores instead of dashes in example filenames
#162 Add final newlines to source files

Maintenance and bug fixes

Pull requests

#91 chore: Update Sycamore to 0.9.1
#105 Simplify the realization triggering system

Issues

#109 Drop the _assemb suffixes from the test assembly loaders
#110 (addressed) Use Self in implementations whenever possible
#116 Awkward factorization of realization results
#120 Use symbolic names for engine coordinate with specific semantics
#124 Upgrade to Rust 1.90
#125 Migrate to the 2024 edition of Rust
#127 Improve creation/specification of SpecifiedValues and/or setting of Regulators
#134 Avoid redundant realizations when adding points
#135 Upgrade to Sycamore 0.9.3
#144 Refactor indexing_error to encompass repetitive uses
#154 Move the command language interpretation system into its own module
#156 Correct the argument-count error messages for Sphere and Point descriptors
#157 (addressed) Add tests that make sure the test assembly loading scripts can be interpreted and run
#160 (addressed) Dodecahedral packing (script) won't load

Tech demo

Pull requests

#113 Write a deployment packaging script

Issues

#98 Make bundle self-contained
#100 Nudging after a first realization fails can cause a panic
#101 Stabilize the position of a sphere when changing its curvature
#102 Update licensing

Interface

Issues

#96 Lock a regulator at its current value
#97 Negative-curvature spheres are shaded wrong
#117 Nudging keys confusing
#122 Entity entries in Outline View
#139 Make the command prompt more terminal-like
#140 Show all user actions in the command history
#141 Give each action a canonical command language representation
#142 Show command interpretation errors
#143 Give better feedback on regulator creation through shortcuts
#146 Controllable order of items in outline view
#149 Refactor: systematize semantics and roles of ids and labels for elements
#150 Make it easy to reassign already-used identifiers
#151 Allow identifier change via direct edit in certain views
#152 Allow CSS color names
#155 In-app documentation
#158 Asymmetry between argument operation in command listener and by gesture

Design

Issues

#145 Action wih (and non-wish) list, not necessarily complete
#132 (addressed) Prototype a keyboard shortcut system