As promised in my weekly report yesterday, this is the first in what will be a series of posts documenting various thoughts and snippets of ideas during the development process for a new Dependency Graph engine for Blender.
As well as serving as rolling documentation of the ongoing work and how various design "quirks" (as they'll inevitably be viewed in retrospect) came about, these posts aim to serve two other important roles. From the perspective of the wider community, it provides greater visibility for this project and/or progress made, which may otherwise be difficult to grasp (since it is not really a flashy front-end tool that users can directly hold in their hands). However, more importantly, writing these posts mainly helps/forces me to really flesh out some areas of the design which I may otherwise forget or gleefully gloss over when a suitable solution comes around. It has been said by many notable people (including various scientists, engineers, and academics) that the act of writing down your thoughts can help clarify and refine those ideas, by forcing you to figure out how to express them in a concise manner (and in the process clarifying/resolving ambiguities), thus moving these from merely nebulous figments of your imagination to somewhat physical (or concrete) entities.
So, welcome along for the ride, as the great Blender Depsgraph project gets underway at last.
(Note: some of these posts have been sitting around for a while now – with delays and other things getting in the way – so dates mentioned are somewhat inaccurate).
