Better optimization debugging tools about penrose

[kai-qu]

@maxkrieger Starting on the skeleton components sounds great. I'll sketch something out tonight and send it to you.

Yeah, showing the energy landscape would be 1) very cool 2) definitely a stretch goal, not top priority. I'm not sure how to visualize the energy landscape clearly for optimization problems in more than two or three dimensions.

[kai-qu]

(Related to #120.)

@maxkrieger I'd like to start working on this issue soon, since @wodeni and I are running into a lot of unexpected slowness when laying out diagrams with more shapes/parameters, and understanding the behavior of the optimizer better will help us debug this problem.

How would you like to coordinate on this? I'm happy to start learning React and figure out how to write a component. Is there more I should know beyond this wiki page?

[maxkrieger]

@hypotext I believe the main roadblock of this is that it would be a lot of refactoring in the backend to pull out information about the optimizer (cc @wodeni). The wiki page should be a decent intro to the frontend workflow, I'm guessing you can put most of the graphs and widgets below the canvas component and we can use a localStorage key to toggle it. That said I'd be happy to help write these components in the meantime and I'll be free to pair after I get back on the 13th.

[kai-qu]

@maxkrieger If you'd like to start working on this, it would be very welcome, as I'm also working on domain implementation in the meantime. I see two ways to move forward:

• Starting soon: I can describe in more detail the kinds of information I'd like to surface, then you can set up and plug in a skeleton component and hand it off to me, then I can figure out how to get the right data out of the system and into the component.
• Or, we can all wait until after the 13th and then start pairing, so we can pool your frontend knowledge with Nimo's system knowledge and my optimization knowledge.

What do you think?

[maxkrieger]

@hypotext I can definitely work on the more time-consuming or reusable skeleton components over the next 1.5 weeks, and we can iron out what's left as a group. It sounds like the hardest component is the energy landscape.

[maxkrieger]

Some preliminary library research:

https://github.com/palantir/react-layered-chart

Ideal interface idea:

with layout (enabled components) saved in localStorage.

[maxkrieger]

• @wodeni mentioned that the old frontend had a basic debugging overlay with bezier control points, etc, which I can add sometime in the near future.

[maxkrieger]

Somewhat related: #212, since #212 would allow us to surface pretty much all of the server state to the frontend