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Comment by notfirstpost

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Comment by notfirstpost

Hi, I'm JC and I built DAGraph over the past few months. It is a visual, graph-based, local-first data web-app, to do computations from simple arithmetic to advanced OLAP SQL.

There's no account or sign up needed to use it. Your data stays in the browser, no upload.

Some technical aspects that might be of interest here:

- written in Rust targeting WASM with Trunk;

- Apache DataFusion for SQL engine + Arrow + Parquet;

- Apache OpenDAL for OPFS for workspace data in browser;

- Egui, an immediate mode GUI (works on WASM and native);

- computation graph is built on top of 'reactive_graph', a core component of the Leptos web framework;

- it's a dynamic functional DAG (directed acyclic graph), dependencies between nodes are determined by the engine (via SQL parsing). Modify an input and the downstream output are recomputed dynamically.

The main website: https://dagraph.com

Direct access to the early preview: https://alpha.dagraph.com/

There are a few basic examples here: https://dagraph.com/examples/

It's still very early - many more features are to be added but it's usable. It requires a modern browser (WASM and OPFS); works on desktop, tablet and phone although a bigger screen is really recommended (zooming out will allow for higher density UI to make it somewhat usable on phones).

To give a bit of context on some of the choices and possibly start discussions, in no particular order:

- dynamic UIs, graphs and analytics: it's a domain I've been interested in. Bret Victor is an inspiration;

- (most) spreadsheets hide formulas and, ironically, aren't table-first. Notebooks suffer from out-of-order evaluation;

- while working on data analytics projects using popular languages and their libraries, I would run into inconsistent APIs and I would eventually end up doing most of the work in SQL. Quite annoying are the platforms that have their own sub-par DSLs (don't get me started on DSLs built on top of YAML);

- immediate mode is an interesting approach to UIs worth experimenting with.

- in-browser app: instead of scaling up, you have to optimize down. The WASM bundle is less than 25MB, 8MB over the wire.

- Local-first: 4-fold: no account needed (it puts me off if I have to create an account when it's clearly not needed); data privacy (both for the user and for dev); as a solo-dev, very low infrastructure cost plus laptops are powerful enough for many workloads now; and no network latency.

Links to some of the projects I mentioned:

- Trunk https://trunk-rs.github.io/trunk/

- Apache Datafusion https://datafusion.apache.org

- OpenDAL https://opendal.apache.org

- Egui https://www.egui.rs

- Reactive graph https://docs.rs/leptos/latest/leptos/reactive/graph/index.ht... - Leptos https://leptos.dev

(edited for formatting)

Replies notfirstpost · 2026-05-13
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