[chuck-users] Moaning&Whining => ChucK is too short, ChucK lacks features

[Hans Aberg]

You might check out the Haskell package Haskore <http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskore 
 >, which allows doing music in a high level OO style. And Tom Lieber  
has made a Ruby port of Chuck, Ruck <http://github.com/alltom/ruck>.

As for using other languages, that is not at all that easy, because  
ChucK, in order to achieve strong timing, runs in a single thread,  
synced every sample time (at about 44 kHz). So timing is in fact quite  
tight.

And a lot of users are not programmers or do not want to program other  
languages when using ChucK - too time consuming. So ChucK really needs  
new features within itself.

The likeness with the Java grammar has in the past been mentioned  
negatively, with the view that ChucK might have been better off with  
having its a more distinct grammar, better adapted to its tasks.


On 6 Sep 2010, at 03:11, Bastian Schumacher wrote:

> Chuck is really good on the musical side. Java is very strong on all  
> the other things, mostly asynchronous control stuff. I´m currently  
> working on a project. I programmed a drum machine in Java to test my  
> drum machine concept. Offline rendering works like a charm and is  
> very fast. But  during realtime playback sometimes when the garbage  
> collector chimes in there is a tiny crackle in the sound. And the  
> latency is rather high. So I decided to use ChucK. I want to use OSC  
> and MIDI to control things via Java and a dedicated hardware control  
> panel in conjunction with my Bachelor Thesis.
>
> I don´t think we need basically functionality in ChucK that are  
> featuread "in almost any language we know" like it has been said. We  
> can do those things in a language of our choice and use a  
> transmission protocol for communication. I think at least at the  
> stage where ChucK is now improving the protocol support (e.g.  
> supporting OSC packages) and adding things that already have been  
> pre-planned (e.g. "private") makes more sense. At least from my  
> point of view it would be very much work to get all those well known  
> features into ChucK. IMO things should be kept simple, then it´s  
> easier to keep things predictable.