mist941/b3s23-engine repository overview

⁠b3s23-engine

Conway's Game of Life (B3/S23) as a self-contained service: a Go simulation core with a REST + WebSocket streaming API and a React/WebGL2 UI — all shipped in a single small distroless container. State lives in SQLite, so the world survives restarts.

⁠Demo

⁠Features

• Interactive editing — draw cells with the mouse (paint, erase, toggle) or stamp classic patterns (glider, LWSS, R-pentomino, acorn, diehard, pulsar, pentadecathlon, Gosper glider gun) with a live ghost preview.
• WebGL2 renderer — bit-packed frames are unpacked on the GPU; smooth pan and zoom even on large grids.
• REST + WebSocket API — full control surface (play/pause/step, reseed, resize, tick rate, cell editing) plus binary frame streaming with per-client backpressure.
• Persistent — the grid is snapshotted to SQLite and restored on restart.
• Compact engine — bit-packed toroidal grid (1 bit per cell) up to 16384×16384, stepped in parallel across CPU cores.
• Easy to run — one small distroless Docker image (amd64 + arm64), no configuration required, health check included.

⁠Run

⁠Docker

docker run -d --name b3s23 -p 8050:8050 -v b3s23_data:/data mist941/b3s23-engine:latest

Open http://localhost:8050⁠ — the UI and the API are served from the same port. The /data volume holds the SQLite database (plus its WAL sidecars), so the simulation survives container restarts.

⁠Docker Compose

Clone the repo, then:

docker compose up -d          # pulls the published image
docker compose up -d --build  # or build it from source

⁠From source

Engine (Go ≥ 1.26, no CGO):

cd engine
go run ./cmd/engined    # API on :8050
go test ./...           # -race needs gcc; CI runs it on Linux

UI dev server (Node ≥ 24) with hot reload, proxying /api to the engine:

cd ui
npm install
npm run dev

Or serve the built UI straight from the engine binary:

cd ui && npm install && npm run build
cd ../engine && go run ./cmd/engined -static ../ui/dist

Run engined -help for all flags (grid size, tick rate, DB path, CORS, …).

⁠License

MIT⁠