14. October 2026
forge v2026.10.2 is mostly one change: the parser and layout code can now be used as a library, without the command line attached. Everything else in the release is dependency upkeep.
forge is a modeling DSL and toolchain for software architecture. You describe structure, processes, deployment and data in a single .forge file, and the forge binary renders SVG diagrams, generates documentation sites, lints the architecture and exposes the model to AI agents over MCP. It’s one statically linked Rust binary, with no JVM, Node or Python. It’s for anyone who wants their architecture diagrams to come from text that lives in the repository, not from a drawing tool. I wrote about how it fits with its sibling tools in A Rust-Native Architecture Toolchain, and the previous release, a JetBrains preview plugin and models on stdin, is in forge 2026.9.8.
This release is 14 commits and 21 files changed, 964 lines added and 82 removed. One commit, “forge as a library: views as diagram-scene scenes; stable layouts”, accounts for 910 of those added lines across 13 files. The other 13 are one small Makefile target, the release bump for v2026.10.1 and eleven dependency updates.
Until now, if you wanted forge’s layout you ran the forge binary and got an SVG. Now the forge_dsl crate exposes the pieces directly. You parse a model, resolving its !include files, list the views it defines, and ask for any view as a scene:
let model = forge_dsl::parse_file("architecture.forge")?;
for view in forge_dsl::views(&model) {
let scene = forge_dsl::scene(&model, &view.key, &measure);
}
A scene is a diagram-scene value: a laid-out diagram as plain data. That’s the library from my diagram-scene post. The point of handing back data rather than pixels is that the host decides how it looks. It draws the scene in its own theme and its own fonts, which is why scene takes a measure argument that should measure the font the text will be drawn in. The README says the emx editor previews .forge files this way. views returns views in declaration order and leaves out composite views, the grids of other views, because their cells are views already.
The library doesn’t drag the command line in with it. Without the default cli feature, none of the CLI’s dependencies are compiled. That means clap, the LSP server, the file watcher, the git and code-analysis crates and the SVG rasterizer. The dependency line from the README:
forge-dsl = { git = "https://github.com/grahambrooks/forge", default-features = false }
The commit title also says “stable layouts”. I can see that the library goes through the same layout code the CLI uses. [unverified: what “stable layouts” changed concretely (for example, whether the same model now always produces the same scene) — I couldn’t confirm that from the README or source, only from the commit title.]
If you only use the forge command, you won’t notice this change. It matters if you’re building something that wants to show a forge model inside its own window.
The rest is the kind of thing you shouldn’t have to think about. The Rust Docker tag moves to 1.99. The Rust crates tokio (1.53.2), toml (1.1.8), serde_json (1.0.154) and symgraph (v2026.10.1) are bumped, along with the Kotlin plugin version for the JetBrains plugin (2.4.21), Gradle (9.8.1) and a handful of GitHub Actions. There’s also a new make watch-ci target, which waits for every CI run on HEAD after a push and fails if any of them fails. It’s a contributor convenience and doesn’t touch the binary.
The README gives four ways to install. With Homebrew:
brew tap grahambrooks/forge https://github.com/grahambrooks/forge
brew install grahambrooks/forge/forge
The formula lives in the forge repo rather than a separate tap, so the tap URL is required. With cargo, the crate is published as forge-dsl and installs a forge binary:
cargo install --locked forge-dsl
Each release also publishes tarballs on GitHub Releases for Linux (x86_64 and aarch64) and macOS (Apple Silicon). Intel Macs have no prebuilt binary, so build from source there. To try unreleased changes from main:
cargo install --git https://github.com/grahambrooks/forge forge-dsl --locked
The README doesn’t describe a separate upgrade command. [unverified: that re-running the install command, or brew upgrade, picks up v2026.10.2 — the README only documents installing.] [unverified: that the crates.io release and Homebrew formula have been updated to v2026.10.2 — the checked-out forge/Cargo.toml still says 2026.10.1.]