Standard library extensions

🐱 Opt-in packages that bolt onto the standard library — you build only what you use. 🐆

The standard library ships with the cheatah toolchain. Extensions are optional packages that live in their own repositories and are pulled in on demand with the biome package manager (biome add <name>, then import). You build only what you opt into — nothing here is compiled unless a project asks for it.

Versions are governed by the Biome Standard: your project pins one standard version, and biome resolves every extension to the exact release tag that was tested with your toolchain. biome add only accepts extensions that are members of your project's standard — an extension that has not yet passed the cross-member gate is listed here but declined at add time, truthfully.

Four extensions are public today, and every one is a Biome Standard member. Read the "Depends on" column carefully: two rest on the standard library alone, and two are built on other extensions, so adding them pulls in more than themselves.

cheatah-gpu — the GPU layer

The simplest way onto the GPU from cheatah: one shared interface over the native GPU APIs, Vulkan and Metal, so you can dispatch compute without the usual bring-up pain. biome add cheatah-gpu, then import gpu.dispatch (or the 1:1 gpu.vulkan / gpu.metal surfaces).

Depends on: the standard library only — no other extension. Its only extra requirements are system packages (the userspace Vulkan loader + validation layers on Linux, or Metal on macOS, plus the Slang shader compiler), which biome's scripts/install-deps.sh provisions. It does not build on any other extension — the dependency arrows point the other way.

cheatah-gpu-linalg — GPU linear algebra

The device backend for the standard library's linalg: a device_array whose elements live in GPU memory, with the SAME linalg.matmul(...) / a + b / linalg.dot(...) calls dispatching to register-tiled GPU kernels by ordinary overload resolution — no new language surface. biome add cheatah-gpu-linalg, then import gpulinalg; gpulinalg.available() answers the "is there a GPU here?" question honestly, and everything degrades to the host linalg when there is not.

Depends on: cheatah-gpu (its Metal/Vulkan surfaces and the software-emulated Metal test device) and the standard library.

cheatah-space — astronomy & spatial math

Vectorized astronomy and spatial-math routines. space.time (Julian Date, Modified Julian Date, J2000, and the NASA CDF_EPOCH bridge) works today; space.cdf and space.irbem are on the roadmap. biome add cheatah-space, then import space.time.

Depends on: the standard library only — no other extension. Everything is concept-templated and vectorized over ndarray (SIMD); there is no GPU, plotting, or cross-extension dependency.

cheatah-plot — cross-platform plotting

Dead-simple plotting: hand it some numbers, get a PNG — rendered by cheatah-plot's OWN compute rasterizer on Vulkan or emulated Metal when a device is present, and by a bit-identical CPU reference everywhere else. Headless first (plot.save / plot.render); windowing is a later plot.window layer. biome add cheatah-plot, then import plot.

Depends on other extensions — note this one. cheatah-plot renders through cheatah-gpu's raw, 1:1 Vulkan/Metal forwarders (cheatah-gpu has no separate "easy" layer, by design — consumers own their orchestration), and its device-resident array math rides cheatah-gpu-linalg's linalg overloads. The full chain is:

cheatah-plot  →  cheatah-gpu-linalg  →  cheatah-gpu  →  standard library
     └────────────────┴───────────────────────┴─────────→ standard library

How the dependencies stay coherent

Each extension is an ordinary cheatah project with a cheatah.toml manifest, and a manifest documents what its extension builds on. But the thing that keeps an inter-extension dependency version-coherent is the Biome Standard: when an extension that depends on another joins a standard, the standard carries both members at tags tested together, so there is never a "which cheatah-gpu does this cheatah-plot need?" question — your standard answers it. (cheatah-plot has not yet joined a standard; it becomes addable the release it passes the cross-member gate.) See biome for how the manifest drives the build, and Imports & module resolution for how each import is then resolved to a module on disk.