I think some of the coolest changes in this release are on the nodes side of things — they added Closures (kinda like lambdas!), Bundles (tuples/structs, I guess?), and Repeat (loops!) (already was in Geo Nodes, now it's in Shader Nodes too).
Blender nodes have come a long way over the past decade and it's incredibly satisfying to see the care with which they have been developed. Blender's node editor is my personal favorite node editor I've ever used in any software, and I often find myself wishing other software adopted some of their UI and UX conventions.
Been a happy user since, oh, v2.75? And looking forward to being a user for many more releases to come.
Plus if you could use WASM modules as opposed to node systems, you would have a more powerful programming environment - for example, the mentioned "repeat" zone doesn't have "break" functionality, so you need to use a huge number of iterations and do an equivalent of "continue" once you're done, but even if you perfectly estimate the number of iterations you will need, the implementation is very slow. There are other problems like limited scope access, or in general slow node evaluation which make sequential algorithms (not reliant on parallelized work done by loops internal to many nodes) problematic.
Blender nodes have come a long way over the past decade and it's incredibly satisfying to see the care with which they have been developed. Blender's node editor is my personal favorite node editor I've ever used in any software, and I often find myself wishing other software adopted some of their UI and UX conventions.
Been a happy user since, oh, v2.75? And looking forward to being a user for many more releases to come.
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