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tgLang: A Domain-Specific Language for Geometry Processing and Computational Imaging Workflows
Vijai Kumar Suriyababu1, Cornelis Vuik1, Matthias Möller1
1Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics, Delft University of Technology, 2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands.
Abstract:
Geometry-processing and computational-imaging workflows combine heterogeneous data structures, topology-changing edits, dense numerical fields, visualization, and repeated experimental variation. These workflows are often clear as algorithms but obscured in software by traversal boilerplate, representation conversions, build-system boundaries, and ad hoc scripting conventions. This paper presents tgLang, a domain-specific language with explicit, runtime-enforced representation types that makes meshes, point clouds, curve networks, grids, two-dimensional images, and image stacks first-class executable values. The language combines manifest types, typed arrays, modules, deterministic parallel constructs, flow-oriented queries, and runtime-provided domain operations. Its current implementation uses a stack-based bytecode virtual machine for reference semantics and dispatches representation-heavy operations to optimized C++ kernels. The evaluation is organized around complete workflows: topological hole detection, distance-field-based mean camber line extraction, voxel downsampling of point clouds, curve-network generation, surface-mesh smoothing and remeshing, image-stack edge detection, morphological image processing, and image-stack surface extraction. These examples show that a domain-aware source language can express multi-representation geometry and imaging algorithms as compact, reproducible programs while preserving explicit representation choices and a path toward deployable implementations.
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