Moonkale

Flow Editor

2 min read

Crate: editors/flow. Drag-and-drop blocks wired by typed ports. First target from the brief: build Lux.jl models by drag and drop; then ModelingToolkit.jl acausal components.

Model

A flow is ordinary graph data: Block nodes, Custom("flow.wire") edges, port info in properties. It lives in any source (a folder as .flow.json, or rows in a database) and is visible in the Graph View. The flow editor adds what a generic graph view can’t: a schema (block kinds with typed ports), snapping, validation and a palette.

flowchart LR
  P[palette: FlowLibrary blocks] -->|drag| C[canvas: SVG blocks + bezier wires]
  C --> V[validate: port types, required inputs, cycles]
  V --> T[Transaction → source]
  T --> G[codegen: Julia file]

Block libraries are contributions

FlowLibrary { blocks: Vec<BlockKind>, codegen } from an extension. Lux.jl library: Dense, Conv, Chain, Parallel, activations, loss, optimiser; port types carry tensor shapes with a small unification so a shape mismatch is a red wire. MTK library: components with physical-unit ports and connect semantics.

Codegen is a command

flow.generate produces files (model.jl with a Chain(...) and a training scaffold; MTK: @named components + connect equations). Being a command, it’s also an LLM tool (LLM and RAG) — “wire a CNN for MNIST” becomes a transaction on the flow graph plus a codegen call.

Rendering

Candidate canvas: dioxus-flow (react-flow for Dioxus, same author as dioxus-workbench): handles, connections, layered auto-layout, custom node views — evaluated 2026-09-17, recommended for Phase 5. Otherwise SVG/Dioxus for typical flows (blocks need rich editable content: parameter fields, previews). Very large flows can fall back to the graph renderer’s surface later.

Built in Milestone 6 ( Milestone 6 - Implementation Log)

editors/flow on dioxus-flow 0.1.2, opt-in; the model (PortType/unify, BlockKind, FlowLibrary, Flow JSON, validate) lives in ext-api::flow so libraries are contributions from other extensions; extensions/lux is the first (Input/Dense/Conv/MaxPool/Flatten/Dropout/BatchNorm/Loss/Optimiser → model.jl). Flows are *.flow.json files. Phase 1 and the codegen half of phase 2 are done; running through the terminal with errors linked to blocks, and the MTK library, are next. Notes: flow.md, lux.md.

Beyond Lux: MTK and Lenticulum

Undirected ports, bipartite constraints and nested subgraphs are what the ModelingToolkit editor needs and what the Lenticulum factor-graph editor — the goal behind Moonkale — builds on: Julia and Lenticulum.

Phases

  1. Canvas, palette, wires, validation, save/load as nodes.
  2. Lux.jl library + codegen; run via Terminal (julia model.jl) with errors linked back to blocks.
  3. MTK library.
  4. Execute-in-place (Julia kernel) — research.

Graph View

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