mefikit 0.1.0

High-performance library for unstructured mesh and field manipulation, designed for scientific computing, mesh processing, and multi-physics workflows.

Mefikit

Mefikit (Meshes and Fields Kit) is a modern, high-performance library for manipulating unstructured meshes and associated fields and groups. It is designed with a minimal, clear, and efficient interface, focusing on flexibility, correctness, and integration in multi-physics simulations and mesh-based data processing pipelines.

🚧 Mefikit is in early development. Key resources to get started and follow progress:

• 📚 Documentation (Mefibook)
• 🗺️ Roadmap
• 📝 Changelog
• 🐍 PyPI
• 📦 Crates.io
• 💻 GitHub

💡 Why Mefikit?

Mefikit aims to make mesh-based development more direct and less error-prone, without sacrificing performance. It reduces low-level array handling so you can focus on algorithms, physics, and data flow.

For scientific developers, it offers:

• 🧠 Higher-level mesh thinking — express operations on fields and geometry instead of indices
• 🧪 Fast experimentation — combine topology, geometry, and fields in a unified API
• 🔗 Python ↔ Rust continuity — prototype and scale with the same concepts
• 🚧 Early-stage flexibility — shape core design choices while the project evolves
• ⚡ Performance-oriented core — efficient execution without hiding the data model

✨ Key Features

🧩 Mesh and Field Core

• Unified, ergonomic UMesh structure:
  • Supports mixed element types in the same mesh
  • Named fields of doubles over elements or nodes
  • Element groups for flexible subdomain handling

🧠 Expression DSL for Fields & Mesh Queries (python and rust)

Mefikit provides a compact, composable DSL to work with fields and mesh regions without manual array handling.

T = mf.Field("temperature")
rhoCp = mf.Field("heat_capacity")
V = mf.Field("measure")

energy = rhoCp * T * V

mesh.eval_update("energy", energy)     # compute & store in Rust as a new field
E = mesh.eval(energy)                  # or materialize as NumPy

energy = mf.Field("energy")            # reference the computed field
submesh = mesh.select(energy > 1e6)    # field-based filtering

domain = mf.sel.bbox(p_min, p_max) | mf.sel.sphere(c, r)
submesh = mesh.select(domain & energy > 1e6)  # field and space filtering

• Symbolic expressions: build computations without touching raw arrays
• Unified queries: combine fields, geometry, and groups (mf.sel.inside(...))
• Efficient execution: evaluated in Rust, with optional NumPy output

This avoids manual indexing over unstructured meshes and keeps computations close to the data, while remaining concise and expressive.

🔄 Input/Output Support

• Built-in (python and rust) support for major file formats:
  • vtk
  • CGNS (planned)
  • json and yaml with serde
• Python conversions
  • PyVista
  • medcoupling
  • meshio

🧮 High-Level mesh operations (Python and rust)

• 🏗️ Mesh Builders
  • cmesh_builder - Builds a grid mesh (1d, 2d or 3d).
  • extrude - Create an extruded mesh (1d x 1d, 2d x 1d)
  • duplicate - Create a mesh by duplication (0d, 1d, 2d, 3d)
  • aggregate – Build a mesh from multiple non overlapping cell groups.
• 🧠 Topological operations
  • descend – Build the descending connectivity mesh (faces from volumes, etc)
  • boundaries – Build the boundaries mesh
  • crack – Introduce topological cracks along internal faces.
  • connected_components – Split the mesh in connected meshes
• 📐 Geometric operations
  • snap - To snap nodes of one mesh on another mesh nodes
  • merge_nodes - Merges duplicated nodes
  • fuse – Merge two meshes into one.
  • intersect – Compute boolean mesh intersection.
  • split – Cut a mesh using another.
  • conformize – Intersect shared faces, snap and merge near-nodes.

🧠 Element kit (rust only)

This element kit provide a nice way to implement new features on elements and use them to build mesh new operations.

• Descending elements (edges/faces of volumes, etc.)
• Equivalence classes of elements
• Simplexization
• Bounding box trees
• Element intersections
• Normal and orientation computation
• Barycentre and volume evaluation
• ...

🧪 Developer Notes

📁 Project Structure

mefikit/
├── crates/      # The rust core library and pyo3 bindings. You can use it as a rust dependency
├── src/         # The python package
├── docs/        # The Mefikit Book

Rust core library

src/
├── mesh/          # Mesh & field data model, the Element API
├── tools/         # The home to all high-level functionnalities
├── io/            # Readers/writers
├── element_kit/   # Element toolbox used to build higher level functionnalities

To build the library, you need to have Rust installed. You can install Rust using rustup. Once you have Rust installed, you can build the library using the following command:

cargo build --release

This will create a release build of the library in the target/release directory.

Memory model: Mesh Ownership, Views, and Shared Coordinates

• UMesh: fully owns its data (coordinates, connectivity, fields, etc.), suitable for storage, transformation, and I/O. Useful to share arrays using copy-on-write. Maximum performance when staying in rust.
• UMeshView<'a>: read-only view into external or borrowed mesh data; ideal for zero-copy FFI.

API philosophy: Explicit is better than implicit

• Out-of-place functional API for heavy op (UMeshView or &UMesh): compute_descending, intersect_meshes, ...
• In-place for metadata manipulations and non destructive op (&mut UMesh): assign_field, merge_close_nodes, add_group, snap, ...

Python package

The crate with the python bindings is called mefikit-py. It contains all the PyO3 stuff. This crate is used as the basis of the python mefikit library. The same name was used for the python library for the sake of simplicity.

To build the bindings and the python package please run:

uv run maturin develop --uv

You can then run:

uv run pytest

uv won't build the package, it is only in charge of the dependencies. maturin is the only one parametrized for this. Please run maturin each time rust mefikit or mefikit-py changed.

Mefibook

docs/
├── src/                # The mdbook root dir
├── python_examples/    # Python notebooks

The mefibook is a mdbook project. Please refer to the mdbook documentation. In two lines, you should:

cargo binstall mdbook
mdbook serve

Jupyter-notebooks are executed and converted to markdown using the following:

uv run make notebooks

uv is used here because the notebooks need jupyterlab, mefikit and all its dependencies to run. As uv won't build mefipy you need to build it first.

Contributing

If you would like to contribute to the library, please fork the repository and create a pull request with your changes. We welcome contributions of all kinds, including bug fixes, new features, and documentation improvements. Please make sure to follow the coding style and conventions used in the library. You should use pre-commit for this purpose.

uv tool install prek
prek install
git commit -a # pre-commit runs on your committed files

This will check the coding style and report any issues. You can also run the following command to automatically format the code:

Benchmarks

The mefkit/benches/ directory contains Mefikit benchmarks. They use the Criterion framework.

To launch the benchmarks, run:

cargo bench

To view results as a static and local website:

firefox ./target/criterion/report/index.html

A convenient CLI tool to visualize a summary of the results is critcmp:

cargo install critcmp
critcmp --list

If a new benchmark source file filename.rs is added inside benches/, Cargo.toml must be adapted accordingly:

[[bench]]
name = "filename"
harness = false

Note that filename, in Cargo.toml, is written without the .rs extension. More information in the Criterion documentation

You can create flamegraphs to spot performance bottleneck.

cargo flamegraph --profile flame --example name_of_the_example

License

Licensed under either of:

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in Mefikit by you shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.