c3c VS libsoundio

C3, "The C-like for people who like C" just reached v0.5, marking its feature-stable release: https://c3.handmade.network/blog/p/8824-say_hello_to_c3_0.5

Feature stability ensures that version 0.5 will undergo bug fixes and maintenance separately from the main branch, providing projects with a stable compiler version to work with.

Try it out in the browser https://learn-c3.org

Github: https://github.com/c3lang/c3c

If you appreciate C, then maybe this is a language you'll enjoy. Dive into the documentation at https://c3-lang.org to view examples and read more in depth about the language.

Tuples are being discussed, although I am unsure if it would be sufficiently useful. (Discussion here and here if you want to leave some thoughts)

I've been trying to build c3lang on my local machine. The problem is that it requires static files for both llvm and lld. Now, the static files for llvm have been provided (llvm-static), but not for lld, at least that's what I think. I thought that maybe I've made a mistake somewhere by not search the package thoroughly. I just wanted to know what package will install static files for lld.

So (preferably) have a little look at the language (https://c3-lang.org/) and maybe try it out (https://learn-c3.org/) and then file whatever issue you want: https://github.com/c3lang/c3c/issues/new

Like this: https://github.com/c3lang/c3c

> I wish we had C+: C + a few niceties (and not C ++ everything). There's a whole bunch of newer languages aiming at the space C is sitting in, but with a few additions C could be much more ergonomic without having to invent an entire new language.

I’ve made a pre-processor for C to add some things I miss, although it is currently limited to what can be done without type information and has to keep compatibility with existing C syntax: https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/cedro/202106171400/

There is another language call C3 that “is a C-like language striving to be an evolution of C, rather than a completely new language”: https://github.com/c3lang/c3c

If you have the time, I’d like to hear which things you miss in C. There might be something I did not imagine that could be added to Cedro.

Off the top of my head, cc99 and c3 are two C dialects that both can do this.

Audio DSP is definitely the deep end of the pool. I believe the Zig programming language owes its creation to Andrew Kelley (the creator) trying to write stuff for an audio workbench going "damn, this is really hard to do with C, why does C suck so much" and just creating a language that's like C but without the bad parts to do it himself. I'm not joking, this is literally the origin of Zig as I've heard it from a podcast, and here is Andrew's old audio lib for proof: https://github.com/andrewrk/libsoundio

http://libsound.io is a great cross platform library for reading and writing to sound cards. i have used it successfully on macos and i’m sure it supports linux and possibly windows too. you will probably also need lib audio for reading and writing to files.

Hmm... after some research it seems that I've misunderstood Zig's situation a bit. Zig has introduced null-terminated string types a couple of years ago, but still encourages you to do most string operations with slices instead. Let me explain:

Zig's string literals (which you create with parenthesis like "Hello world!") are null-terminated byte arrays, expressed as the type const [N:0]u8 (where the :0 tells you that it's null-terminated), whereas the more typical array might be written as const [N]u8. The reason for this feature is not because the language wants you to use null-terminated strings, but because these static strings need to be stored in the global data section of the ELF executable, and these require you to use null-termination. But if you want to do any mutable operation with this string, you need to convert this into a proper slice (ptr + size). And it seems like Zig developers don't really use null-terminated types that much at the API level, but use it for things like C interop or cases where you really need it for special optimizations.

Noting that from the PR that introduced this feature, Andrew Kelley writes:

> I think you will find that the Zig community in general (and especially myself) agrees with you on this [null-terminated strings being fragile], and APIs in general should prefer slices to null terminated pointers. Even if you are using Zig to create a C library, and even in actual C libraries, I would recommend pointer and length arguments rather than null terminated pointers, like this: https://github.com/andrewrk/libsoundio/blob/1.1.0/soundio/so...

> That being said, I want to repeat what I said earlier about null terminated pointers: A null terminated array is not inherently an evil C concept that is intruding in the Zig language. It's a general data storage technique that is valid for some memory constrained use cases. I also stumbled on a Real Actual Use Case inside LLVM. The bottom line for me is that null terminated pointers exist in the real world, and especially in systems programming. You can see this in interfaces with the operating system in the standard library...

So he acknowledges null-terminated strings can certainly be useful in certain situations outside of legacy reasons, which is good to know. And Zig creating a special type for this shows that a good systems language needs to be designed to accommodate the needs of the outside world.

Perhaps you could use either http://libsound.io/ or SDL2 game library + SDLAudioIn (http://burningsmell.org/sdl_audioin/) which provides low-level APIs to access operating-system sound systems like Alsa, PulseAudio, PipeWire, and CoreAudio (not sure how well it is supported by SDL2).

Comparison: https://github.com/andrewrk/libsoundio/wiki/libsoundio-vs-SD...

Fun fact: Andrew Kelley, the creator of the Zig programming language, kind of created it so he could work on audio processing.

Based on: https://github.com/andrewrk/libsoundio/blob/master/example/sio_sine.c

Does this fit your needs? https://github.com/andrewrk/libsoundio

I listened to the Co-recursive podcast the other day that featured Andrew Kelley, the creator of the Zig programming language. Before Zig he developed Libsoundio - https://github.com/andrewrk/Libsoundio, to solve problems around realtime audio.

Audio will probably come later, but libsoundio will be the first thing in terms of groundwork. Integrating that in the same way we've integrated GLFW, so you can just cross compile and get cross-platform audio to boot.