## What is Polydat?
Polydat is a variates construction engine.
More specifically, Polydat is all of:
* function graph grammar
* procedural generation kernel
* function library and loader
* runtime type-safety reifier
* parameter space projection system
* context layering API
* expression language
* workload simulation compiler
## Why? It's too many things!
Polydat is, ultimately, the distilled and sharpened variate generation system
needed for systems like nb-rs. In fact, Polydat wasn't designed as a system
against a set of new requirements. It evolved as a reduction of nosqlbench's
core features during a rust port. Polydat is what you get when you take the
essence of a complex but capable system like nosqlbench and compress it down
with heat and pressure until it is forced to take a minimal, elemental shape.
## Motivation
A lesson learned while evolving nosqlbench steered Polydat to where it is now:
__Managing many testing and simulation parameters can be overwhelming!__
In nosqlbench, users have to manage a variety of parameters in different places
with different formats. Polydat's design categorically avoids this problem,
since all the values used in a workload simulation are owned by the same
subsystem.
* Workload parameters on the command line -> Polydat
* Template parameters in the workload -> Polydat
* Procedural generation recipes -> Polydat
* Op template fields and bindings -> Polydat
* Dimensional configuration parameters and labels -> Polydat
What this means in practice is that a single set of rules applies everywhere,
and since everything is owned by the same subsystem, you can always ask it
exactly where a value comes from or how it is computed. All variables used in a
simulation are connected through the same substrate with a supporting grammar
and a consistent set of precedence and referencing rules.
## Documentation
- [Illustrations](docs/illustrations.md) — runnable examples through the Polydat
DSL and the programmatic Assembler API.
- [Compilation](docs/compilation.md) — Phase 1 / 2 / 3 levels, Hybrid mode,
throughput numbers, and the `jit` /
`vectordata` Cargo features.
- [Nodes](docs/nodes.md) — the 250+ built-in function nodes.
- [License](docs/license.md) — Apache-2.0; full text at [LICENSE](LICENSE).
Part of the [nb-rs](https://github.com/nosqlbench/nb-rs) workspace.