faust VS DaisySP

Glicol looks very cool! Also check out Faust if you haven't (https://faust.grame.fr), another FP sound programming language.

The linked (https://github.com/grame-cncm/faust) looks reasonable to me.

Chata probably needs to work out roughly what the semantics of the language should be. Its good to know what the library support is intended to be as that informs language design (assuming the library is to be implemented in chata anyway). Quite a lot of this page is about syntax.

There are some design decisions that have deep impact on programming languages. Reflection, mutation, memory management, control flow, concurrency. There are some implementation choices that end up constraining the language spec - python seems full of these.

Echoing p4bl0, implementing the language will change the spec. Writing a spec up front might be an interesting exercise anyway. I'd encourage doing both at the same time - sometimes describe what a feature should be and then implement it, sometimes implement something as best you can and then describe what you've got.

Implementation language will affect how long it takes to get something working, how good the thing will be and what you'll think about along the way. The usual guidance is to write in something familiar to you, ideally with pattern matching as compilers do a lot of DAG transforms.

- I'd say that writing a language in C took me ages and forced me to really carefully think through the data representation.

- Writing one in lua took very little time but the implementation was shaky, probably because it let me handwave a lot of the details.

- Writing a language in itself, from a baseline of not really having anything working, makes for very confusing debugging and (eventually) a totally clear understanding of the language semantics.

Good luck with the project.

Faust integration would be awesome: https://faust.grame.fr Then again we have MaxMSP, so in the end it feels kind of redundant

Csound is extremely powerful, but my favorite thing in this vein these days is Faust:

https://faust.grame.fr/

It's a functional language with a nice way of generating diagrams of DSP algorithms, but its big killer feature for me is its language bindings, which include C, C++, Cmajor, Codebox, CSharp, DLang, Java, JAX, Julia, JSFX, "old" C++, Rust, VHDL, and WebAssembly (wast/wasm) out of the box.

Have a look at FAUST as well: https://faust.grame.fr/

Once you have an idea of basic programming practice, you need to learn some DSP programming. One of the better tools for this is Faust https://faust.grame.fr/ , bear in mind this is a functional programming language, and has very different syntax to C++, but the same principles apply.

You are about to bite off a lot. Ignore all the other advice in this thread, I do this for a living.

You have some software experience, this is good. Assuming you have embedded software experience (which is essential for what you are doing and not at all like web programming) you have a foothold to finish this project without going completely insane.

Hardware is a completely different beast. With software everything happens in your head and when you get stuck you can usually think your way out of it. With hardware, you really do need to learn to do things meticulously and step by step. There are many things that can go wrong. You will learn a lot on this journey.

Don't be afraid to ask for help. Finding a hardware community will be essential to do this as you learn the skills you need. You're going to make a lot of mistakes, best to go in embracing it

A good place to start is to join an open source community for MIDI. Two off the top of my head is http://www.ucapps.de/ for MIDI specific hardware and https://www.electro-smith.com/daisy

A large amount of the work you will find yourself doing at the beginning is just figuring out where and who to ask questions about things like the keybed and other hardware issues. None of this is terribly 'hard' but none of it is easy. Most of it comes from experience.

It is almost always best to use someone else's product when you are designing your first. Roger Linn (https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/) gave me some fantastic advice a couple years ago when I was trying to design switch caps: "Do you want to be a company that designs switch caps or one that designs synthesizers?" and that stuck. I don't want to design switch caps, so I bought them off the shelf, contracted someone to design my own, and moved on.

So to that end... just buy a couple keybeds from Fatar or someone else, or just grab a synth you already have or buy one off ebay and harvest the keybed from that (often times much cheaper than buying direct!)

Don't be afraid to spend money on tools. If you find something difficult, like soldering, I have not once regretted spending money on better tools. They grow with you and save you hundreds if not thousands of hours of unnecessary frustration. When you know you need a tool, find a way to get it.

Maybe I should make a blog post about this... hmm

Hope that helps!

Check out Daisy DSP from ElectroSmith. They have an entire platform you can build your own synth upon. Many new EuroRack modules being released over the last ~1.5 years are built upon the Daisy SDK.

Here is the GitHub https://github.com/electro-smith/DaisySP

For an excellent implementation of C++ embedded audio DSP, checkout the DaisySP project and associated hardware. The libDaisy audio drivers abstract this block processing well.

There is a github page for this that has downloadable firmware and a link to the firmware programmer which suggests that it’s running on a Daisy. Although it would be ethically super questionable at best, it probably wouldn’t be that hard to reverse engineer.