// the find
chipnertkj/chipbox
Open-source DAW with a node graph system.
chipbox is a pre-alpha DAW written in Rust with an unusual architecture: a QuickJS runtime running a SolidJS/TypeScript frontend inside the native app, rendered via a custom scene graph through Vello (GPU). It's a solo developer's serious long-term project targeting microtonal music, plugin formats (VST3, CLAP, SFZ), and a node graph synth system — none of which actually exist in the code yet.
The rendering stack is genuinely interesting — skipping a browser engine entirely and mapping a DOM-like DSL to Vello graphics primitives is an unusual and principled choice that avoids Electron bloat. The HMR integration with a custom QuickJS client is clever engineering: you get live reload during development without shipping a browser. The crate decomposition is clean (audio, dsp, render, scene, js are properly separated). Using PortAudio with explicit ASIO bindings written from scratch rather than pulling in a convenience wrapper shows willingness to do the hard platform work.
There's no audio yet. The `chipbox-audio` and `chipbox-dsp` crates exist but their src/lib.rs files are almost certainly stubs — stars and topics like VST3/CLAP/JACK are aspirational, not implemented. The architecture bet is also high-risk: QuickJS + SolidJS inside a native app via a custom DOM-to-scene-graph bridge is a lot of bespoke plumbing to maintain forever, and if Vello's API shifts (it has) you own that migration. With 4 forks and one active contributor, the bus factor is 1. Anyone looking at this as a foundation for real music production work is at least two years early.