October 2008 - chuck-dev - lists.cs.princeton.edu

UGen tutorial
by Stephen Sinclair 31 Oct '08

31 Oct '08

Hi folks, I started writing a little tutorial on how to create a UGen from scratch. This is for people who are comfortable with a little C/C++, of course. Anyways, feel free to help me make this as clear and easy as possible. For now it might be enough to get you going, at least, but it could probably be clarified a lot more. http://wiki.cs.princeton.edu/index.php/ChucK/Dev/UGen_Tutorial Steve

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GLucK and good Linux IDE
by Jacob Lewellen 28 Oct '08

28 Oct '08

Hi, I'm a junior CS major at Princeton and for my Junior Independent work for this semester, I'm going to be try my hand at adding a graphical API to ChucK, which will be called GLucK. The current plan is to create another thread for just graphics that will be controlled at the back end by GLUT functions. At the moment I'm just trying to get a feel for the source code to figure out what and where I will have to change. If anyone has any tips on what part of the code to start with, I'd be happy to hear them. The other question I have is if anyone knows of a good C++ IDE for Linux to use for developing ChucK. If necessary I'll just use Emacs or something of that ilk, but if there's something good out there that has good autocompletion and that sort of thing, I'd prefer it. Thank you, Jacob Lewellen

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string support
by Joachim Ganseman 27 Oct '08

27 Oct '08

Hello, After some experiments of my own, and following the tutorial at ISMIR'08, I'd like to see if I can contribute something to ChucK. Main thing that I'd like to see added is support for strings. Not much, but in such a way that a fairly common thing like a parser could be written. I work with MusicXML myself, and I'd love to be able to parse a music score in ChucK. Outputting and concatenating is a good beginning, but what I'd like to see is e.g. an [] operator to select characters in a string (treating it as an array), eventually augmented with some basic functionality like the things that can be found in the C++ STL or the Java standard library. Before I dive blindly into the code and hacking things together, I'd like to open this up for discussion first: - a lot of C++ STL implementations are infamous for not being threadsafe. Shredsafeness seems to me however a first requirement. True or false? If anyone has some good pointers or links on this issue, please let me know! - Any major programming language today has to be able to process Unicode strings. This also brings up the problem of different encodings, etc... Perhaps it's a good idea to model strings after Java, and have a look at how Java VM's do it? - After giving it some thought I'd like to avoid introducing a character datatype, and instead regard a character as a string with length 1. There's already types enough in this world. But is this feasible, or do I miss something which would require a character type? - Is it perhaps easier to integrate a string library from another open source project instead of writing an own library? Pointers and links very welcome! - Java and C++ have very different ways of handling strings. In Java all strings are managed in a pool in the VM and only references to them are used at runtime, while in C++ you can endlessly screw around with pointers to char arrays. Which paradigm is preferable in ChucK? (personally, I tend to say Java, but then again, I truly hate the difference between the == and .equals() operators messing with my mind) I don't have much spare time so I'm not going to promise that I'm even going to start working on this - if the task at hand would eventually seem to be too big, It's perhaps better for a grad student's project... All the best from Belgium, Joachim Ganseman PhD student @ Visionlab University of Antwerp Belgium

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chuckian time as continuations
by Stephen Sinclair 11 Oct '08

11 Oct '08

Hi, I posted a blog entry about some thoughts on ChucK's concept of time and how it relates to programming languages and VMs.. http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~sinclair/content/blog/chuckian_time_as_continua… Thought I may as well post it here, in case it's interesting ... (reply here, I don't have discussions enabled on my blog..) Steve

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EaRing - dynamic assembler
by Stephen Sinclair 06 Oct '08

06 Oct '08

I just read about this because it was posted on reddit.. http://www.zedshaw.com/projects/earing/ It just made me wonder.. it actually sounds like it would make an interesting back-end for something like ChucK. It assembles a sort of high-level assembler code, loads it into memory dynamically and compiles it to actual machine code to run at 100% CPU speed. Features (from the site): * You can swap the contents of functions or alter them as if they were data. * You can plug in any memory management you need. * It can open dynamic libraries and run the functions like they are another module. * You can ship the code to other machines and they'll just run it. * It's still fast because, after the first compile, it runs at CPU speed. Pretty interesting! The thought of using an alternative VM for running ChucK code more efficiently is kind of interesting.. ChucK could compile down to this EaRing bytecode and then let its VM and "assembler" take care of the heavy lifting to make things run at top speed. Steve

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SoundFonts in ChucK
by Tom Lieber 02 Oct '08

02 Oct '08

I've confirmed that Kyle Super's code for using SoundFonts in ChucK is working with version 1.2.1.2 in OS X, and it is said to work in Linux as well. These are the steps I took to install: 1) Download and install FluidSynth from <http://fluidsynth.resonance.org/trac/wiki/Download>. I installed version 1.0.8 from source with "./configure && make && sudo make install" 2) Apply the attached diff to chuck 1.2.1.2. 3) Compile ChucK with "make osx". If on Linux, build with "make alsa". -- Tom Lieber http://AllTom.com/

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