This is pretty similar to the caching used by the Grasshopper3d visual programming environment, which also deals with 3d geometry: https://www.grasshopper3d.com/
It's a crucial optimization to enable the kind of live programming environment you're talking about here, especially since some nodes ("components") are much more expensive to execute than others. The DAG of the program is laid out in the workspace, and it means users can smoothly drag sliders downstream even if re-executing the whole program from scratch would be prohibitively expensive. It's a lovely way to iterate on creative visual programs.
FWIW Wadge and Ashcroft tried a similar cache the world approach and ran into issues, but that was half a century ago, when storage was way more expensive...
This is pretty similar to the caching used by the Grasshopper3d visual programming environment, which also deals with 3d geometry: https://www.grasshopper3d.com/
It's a crucial optimization to enable the kind of live programming environment you're talking about here, especially since some nodes ("components") are much more expensive to execute than others. The DAG of the program is laid out in the workspace, and it means users can smoothly drag sliders downstream even if re-executing the whole program from scratch would be prohibitively expensive. It's a lovely way to iterate on creative visual programs.
FWIW Wadge and Ashcroft tried a similar cache the world approach and ran into issues, but that was half a century ago, when storage was way more expensive...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_(programming_language)
https://billwadge.com/2022/07/17/we-demand-data-the-story-of...