Integrate napi-rs for visualization

[magick93]

Hello

Thanks for sharing your work. It looks looks like a really nice design!

It would be good to visualize the state machines. Integrating napi-rs could help with integrating into a javascript / typescript visualization framework.

[seuros]

Checked napi, it's looks really cool framework.

But first we need to port all the features from Ruby to have a stable Interface. I don't want to have to rework the visualization layer while mutating the while architecture.

In Ruby, i built a concept of Renderer.. The state machine can be rendered into simple text, dot files, or mermaid.

We could do the same here, and then add a napi extension.

Do you have any idea how you will do it ? And what does a custom node export with napi could provide that mermaid can't.

[magick93]

I've only used napi-rs in very simple cases.

what is do a custom node export with napi could provide that mermaid can't

Potentially be interactive. It could be possible to see active states, and even build the state machine via a UI. But to do this there would probably need to be functions to add and connect states.

[seuros]

I see the use case, thanks.

A GUI is good to have in some cases, but I think we'd be entering the realm of no-code development then.

In my workflow, I prefer tooling that helps with introspection or shows me what I have coded. Even with AI, I use it to either document my code or reorganize it.

Because I can keep writing in the same file for thousands of LOC, I have no context limit.

Introspecting the FSM is something that 100% of devs will use, especially when I add nested state machines.

But a GUI could be an external product.

Im willing to provide an interface/api/napi to achieve this, but the mutation/code generation should be in the other product.

[magick93]

I am also very much wanting to see the code, and am no way advocating for a strickly no-code use case.

A good example of what I'm advocating is https://xstate.js.org/ where there is a visual representation of the state machine.

For statemachines-rs to have a one-to-one visual representation, it would basically need to be serializable to json. This would also help with persisting and restoring of a machine state.