Bifrost and Amino

Amino is the foundation of Bifrost. It defines a graph-based programming language, offers a compiler to transform these graphs into efficient native machine code representations and provides a runtime environment to execute those graphs. As an analogy, it can be thought of as the C++ language, its compiler and its runtime.

Bifrost is built on top of Amino. To keep the same analogy, while Amino provides the basic language constructs (conditionals, loops, etc.) along with built-in nodes and types ("keywords"), Bifrost extends its functionality just like the C++ standard library extends C++'s capabilities. It provides content via node and graph libraries written in the Amino language or using the Bifrost SDK. Those libraries are packaged as Bifrost Packs. Bifrost also provides tools to manipulate and build Amino programs through visual programming.

While Bifrost should be seen as a set of libraries and tools, it can be integrated in a host environment to enable artists to write, edit, compile and run Amino programs. The Bifrost for Maya plug-in is the integration of Bifrost into the Maya application.