Stephen Sinclair wrote:
> Does anyone know any interesting and powerful languages that can be
> used just like C? That can link to C libraries, and can be compiled to
> native machine code, and can express the same low-level concepts as C,
> but in a more powerful and intuitive way? In short, does anyone know
> any languages other than C and C++ that would be interesting for audio
> programming?
As SuperCollider and ChucK show, being interpreted and dynamically typed
doesn't preclude lowlat realtime audio work. I'd also like to mention my
own brainchild Q (http://q-lang.sf.net), a general-purpose functional
programming language which interfaces nicely to MidiShare, Faust and
(via OSC) SuperCollider and is certainly usable for doing soft realtime
stuff for audio and computer music applications.
> I have often wondered what I might do if I tried to design such a
> language, but I think it's just too big a task.
You can bet on that. :) Faust, ChucK and SuperCollider are all
domain-specific languages which makes the task somewhat simpler. There's
no doubt that creating a very-high-level language, which supports *both*
lowlat signal processing and general-purpose programming equally well,
will be a major undertaking which still needs a considerable amount of
research. One might argue that modern-style FPLs like Ocaml and Haskell
are almost there, but AFAICS they still lack realtime-capable
multithreading and decent multimedia interfaces. And we need more brave
souls like Erik who are willing to stray away from the traditional paths
and give those new languages a chance. ;-)
Albert
-- Dr. Albert Gr"af Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany Email: Dr.Graef@email-addr-hidden-online.de, ag@email-addr-hidden-mainz.de WWW: http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/agReceived on Fri Jul 21 20:15:02 2006
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Fri Jul 21 2006 - 20:15:02 EEST