Has anyone else looked at O'Caml? :
http://www.ocaml.org/
I've been coding in it for about 6 weeks and I'm REALLY enjoying it. Its the most fun I've had coding in ages.
Yes, those modern functional languages really bring back the joy to hacking. :) The trouble with ML and Haskell is, though, while they already have some facilities for graphics programming, at this time they mostly lack other multimedia libraries. (And I'm wondering how suitable Haskell would be for realtime stuff, given its lazy evaluation strategy. ML certainly is, in fact it's been reported that in some cases compiled ML is even faster than C ...)
But the world doesn't end there. E.g., there's Faust for audio programming (developed at Grame, must admit that I haven't tried it yet, but I certainly will), and (shameless plug) Q (http://q-lang.sf.net), which already has interfaces to PortAudio, libsndfile (of course ;-), MIDI, OSC, SuperCollider and whatnot. Q takes the route to represent MIDI and OSC messages as high-level (algebraic) data types, so most transformations (such as mapping MIDI input to SuperCollider control messages) are almost trivial to implement. Q is also embeddable in C, so you can use it inside a C/C++ program if you need that.
If anyone has the FFTW sources on their machines, they already
have some O'Caml source :-). The FFTW authors wrote a program in O'Caml to generate the C code for the codelets.
Yes, that's a nice twist. :) Apparently plugging together the different FFTW algorithms becomes so complicated that they use OCaml to do algebraic simplifications on the resulting graphs.
Albert
-- Dr. Albert Gr"af Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://www.musikwissenschaft.uni-mainz.de/~ag
