Vision

In the Stencil project, we are pursuing a means for building high-performance, flexible visualizations that can run on a variety of platforms. Stencil itself attempts to be runtime-agnostic, but provide facilities to interact with the specific features of a particular runtime when desired. To achieve this goal, Stencil follows the little-langauge philosophy and relies heavily on building abstractions on top of a the small core language.

Plans and Dreams

Stencil is an evolving system. We have plans for delcarative interaction specifciation (including CMV), visual integration (reactive to the actual device being plotted on), higher-level grammars (such as Grammar of Graphics) and an expressive guide system.

From a technilogical standpoint, we are looking at an optional inference-drive static type system, streaming data support and an in-situ HPC runtime (among other things).