[chuck-users] benchmarking chuck

[Perry R Cook]

Time for me to chime in here.  No apologies offered
for ChucK performance.  I have steadfastly insisted
that we not take away any development time to
optimise.  Three reasons for that:

1) Ge's PhD thesis is ChucK, and a PhD should espouse
a new, useful, and hopefully brilliant philosophy.
ChucK is certainly that, I think you'll agree.

2) Moore's law promised that we'd get a doubling
every 12-18 months.  Turns out this isn't true
any more for the last couple of years, but might
kick in sporadically and give us enough doublings
to get us to 512 sine waves at a forseeable point
in the future.  Boulez told Wessel that if he could
get 512 real-time sine waves, that's all he'd need.

3) As long as ChucK writes soundfiles without clicks,
we can revisit that most magical time in computer
music history when everyone used an algorithmic,
text-based language, and listened to the result
after it was rendered.  Real-time is awesome, but
expressive code is universally powerful, and the
latter will become the former if we just wait a
spell.

PRC

PS: Wonder how many sines Max/MSP will spin?