vipsdisp VS nip2

if you're using linux (which it doesn't seem so) there's also vispdisp https://github.com/jcupitt/vipsdisp which is based on https://github.com/libvips/libvips which will likely take over how images are decoded in the future for everything, at least methodology wise.

Yes, I based it partly on visual programming system that Canon made back in the 90s. I loved the interactive development, but I really disliked that style of visual programming. Lines between boxes seems very hard to reason about, to me.

nip2 tries to do something similar, but using expressions, like a spreadsheet. Unlike graphical plugs and wires, expressions allow things like copy-paste, smart refactoring, referential transparency, and progressive rewriting.

nip2 is ancient now (I finished it way back in 2002, I think). I've started a rewrite for gtk4 -- the image display window is here:

https://github.com/jcupitt/vipsdisp

It's quite fancy -- it has a sparse pyramid of image tiles which get composited to your display by the GPU, and computed asynchronously by a libvips pipeline as you zoom and pan around. You should get a smooth 60 fps even with enormous (eg. 300,000 x 300,000 pixel) images.

nip2 has `.ws` files for storing workspaces (just a big chunk of XML), and `.def` files for its own scripting language.

The nip2 scripting language is also very odd: it's something like dynamically typed Haskell, but with classes. You can see roughly what it looks like here:

https://github.com/libvips/nip2/blob/master/share/nip2/start...

All of the menus are implemented in this thing.