Reso -- A visual logic circuit design language

Reso is a visual circuit design language, meant to let anybody who can draw pixel art create executable logic circuits, inspired by Redstone and Conway's Game of Life.

Installation and usage

Reso is on crates.io and can be installed with cargo:

# Compile Reso from source
cargo install reso

# Run 16 simulation steps on `reso_logo.png`, outputting to `out_xx.png`.
reso -input reso_logo.png -output out_ -numiter 16 -verbose

Alternatively, you can clone Reso from GitHub or from GitLab:

# Compile Reso from source
git clone git@github.com:resolang/reso.git
cd reso

# Run 16 simulation steps on `reso_logo.png`, outputting to `out_xx.png`.
cargo run --release -- -input reso_logo.png -output out_ -numiter 16 -verbose

Ten-color palette

There are ten syntactically-relevant colors which get compiled, the other 16777206 colors are ignored. The palette is an important part of Reso! A region is defined by the colors it is made out of.

For backwards compatibility with new functionality, we reserve a total of 48 colors. (This is by convention and is not enforced by the Reso simulator.)

A brief description of how programs run: Wires push their signals through input nodes. There are three different colors of wire (orange, sapphire, and lime). Input nodes pass these signals to logic nodes and output nodes. Logic nodes are used to calculate the 'AND' or 'XOR' of every input signal, and push these on to output nodes. The output nodes act as one big OR gate, pushing the new signals out to wires.

The colors of different wires don't have any significance. They exist to make it easier to wire on the 2D torus, and to make it easier to keep track of the meaning of wires.

Reserved 48-color palette

Here's the full palette of colors that we consider "reserved". Other colors are 'whitespace', i.e. will not have any semantic significance.

(Note: Don't sample directly from your web-browser! They don't always render colors reliably.)

Trivia

"Reso" refers to both the circuit description language and the simulator.

Reso is not a cellular automaton, because regions of cells update neighboring regions, allowing them infinite reach, whereas cellular automata operate over a finite neighborhood.

Reso instead defines a digital logic circuit graph. That is to say, the visual language is used to define a logic graph.

Reso is called "visual" rather than "graphical", because saying "the visual language is compiled to a graph" is less confusing than "the graphical language is compiled to a graph".

History

In 2015, took a digital logic design course at UConn and came up with the initial sketch for Reso. This course lifted the veil on the fantastic Minecraft Redstone computers I had seen years prior. I proposed the idea as a senior design project in 2017, but it was rejected.

Early 2018, I implemented a custom three-species Game of Life and a three-species Brian's Brain-esque cellular automata. Implementing these gave me good enough chops at working on a grid to implement Reso.

So I ultimately implemented Reso in Python in the summer of 2018. You can see the original Python implementation here.. I tried learning Rust this summer with the intention of reimplementing Reso, but I didn't get too far.

In 2021, I reworked Reso, updating the palette and logo and cleaning up the code for presentation at the 2021 BangBangCon (!!Con).

In 2022, ashirviskas made a Rust implementation, but I honestly did not know enough Rust to understand it! I went back to doing my own implementation.

Early 2023, I was able to start writing Rust in earnest. I learned a lot while writing Phantasm, a fantasy assembly language.

Over this whole time, Reso was stewing in my mind, and I realized a number of improvements that could be made. So, when I reimplemented Reso in Rust in late 2023, I did a complete overhaul, with very little translation from the original Python source.

Honestly, I am not great at Rust. If you're someone who thinks they know better, I'd happily welcome improvements and criticism!

Related and similar projects

I'm not the first person to come up with the idea of an executable, drawn-circuit!

• Mentioned above, ashirviskas made a Rust implementation too!
• Various cellular automata are Turing complete and can be used to build a processor.
  • Conway's Game of Life -- A Turing-complete zero-player-game. By far the most popular cellular automata. Rest in Peace John Conway.
  • Wireworld -- Another cellular automata in which it is easy to implement logic circuits.
  • Brian's Brain -- A cellular automaton similar to the previous.
• Bitmap Logic Simulator -- I'm not sure how this works, but check it out! It's a similar idea.
• Turing Paint and Doodle Code, which have a similar idea of "doodle-able logic circuits".
• Wired Logic, similar to wire-world, simulating circuits in an image.
• Lots of games:
  • Minecraft especially for redstone, an in-game resource that lets you build circuits.
  • Zacktronics, known for games which focus heavily on computation.
  • Hempuli is one of my favorite game devs, and seeing their development on Baba Is You kept my brain on the right track for this.
  • This in-browser videogame that has you build circuits and solve problems.

Projects with a similar name

Reso was influenced by redstone, esolangs, and Python. The goal was to make digital logic circuits that could be built by anybody who can use MS Paint.

• The Real Estate Standards Organization, which is completely unrelated to this.
• 18kimn/Reso, an unrelated project which turns R into an esoteric language.