Greetings Inventor and all! Just a quick note of things on the way, some of which is in progress now, others to happen largely this summer:
I look into my crystal ball and I see the future of ChucK, AKA my wish list:
I like what your crystal ball shows, for it is almost completely in line with our current TODO list...
o MAUI ported to PC/Linux (on the way, woohoo!)
woohoo, indeed!
o fix noteOff () problem
Hopefully by summer!
o String Processing: preferably inspired by Perl o Garbage Collection
I see these things going together. Hopefully by end of summer!
o File I/O: I want to save and load program settings o printf (): formatted text/numeric output.
Andrew Schran, Rebecca, and I are working on this, building on existing work by Martin Robinson and others. ETA: end of summer?
o Hierarchical Events: i.e. event when any button in an array is pressed
This is an often requested feature, we still need assess a few things before going forth on it. Huh, I said "assess"...
o MAUI Expansion: Text I/O, File Browser, 2D drawing, 3D drawing, etc.
There are actually even more encompassing, MAUI-friendly, plans for a cross-platform 2D/3D graphics/OpenGL ChucKian API in general, which would include among other things a 3D-accelerated UI programming interface. Probably not this summer though.
o Tube Amplifier UGen o Piano STK Instrument
No plans for these yet, but hopefully with the to-be-improved UGen/UAna import system, it'd be easier to add chuck-ins! Also, there is a prototype fluidsynth UGen in development (by Kyle Super) that loads and plays soundfonts. One of the reasons that things are going slowly: while we love rapid development/releases when it's appropriate, we also believe that it's important to make sure certain things (particularly new API and syntax/semantics) work as elegantly as we can make them and can support extensions down the line. As for the lack of developer documentation, this is indeed a huge gap we need to address. We'll priority boost that, hopefully an early summer project.
And there is one observation I'd like to share... Aside from it's musical capabilities, the one outstanding feature of ChucK to me is the way that everything works together. ChucK is very Apple/Linux-like in the way that it seems to be so well thought out. Of the dozen or two languages I've played with over the years, ChucK has got to be the most fun and the easiest to code because stuff just plain works. So my hat's off to the dev ChucKists, us user ChucKists are having a blast with your hard work!
Wow, thanks! This means a super great deal to us. We'll keep on ChucKin', and are stoked you are doing the same! For those about to ChucK... we salute you! Ge! PS: MAUI pong is ridiculously sweet... this, along with Perry's recent MAUI-based octave-band spectrum analyzer (which we'll hopefully witness soon!), deserve awards for The Most Unholy/Unexpected/Clever Use of ChucKian Technology of the Month.