Hi everybody, Thanks for all your reactions! I've decided to go with OSC instead of pipes, which turns out to be really great! For the ones interested, I use pyGame for visualization and pyOSC for communication, those two work also very fine. A different question I now have is, how do I convert a float to a string? Haven't been able to find this in the documentation/examples. :( Greetings, Tom Aizenberg Original: Hi All, I am trying to make a visualization program for ChucK programs. For the communication between ChucK and the C++ code I'm writing, I use a pipe. I'd rather use a socket but I cannot see how this works in ChucK (?). When I write to chout I need to flush the buffer, just to read in the output using my own program. When I try to do this (i.e. my_IO_object.flush()) I get the following message: "(IO): internal error! inside an abstract function! help! note: please hunt down someone (e.g., Ge) to fix this..." The command I use is: chuck-1.2.1.3-exe\bin\chuck.exe chuckVis\chuckFiles\random1.ck, on Windows Vista 32-bits. Without the .flush() the script works fine, but I need the flush functionality. Has anybody got a clue how to fix this? Or maybe how to use ChucK to send messages through a socket? Greetings, Tom Aizenberg