score VS Rack

https://ossia.io uses widgets and qgraphicsscene for the main UI rendering and Qt rhi for the GPU pipeline, and it's performing well enough for our use-cases - I was working on it on a 1080p screen on a Pi4 recently and it certainly felt much much faster and responsive than chrome on the same hardware.

I use it for live c++ recompilation in https://ossia.io - all the code is in there. https://github.com/ossia/score/tree/master/src/plugins/score-plugin-jit/JitCpp

> I feel like visual programming gets a bad rap because of things like this. As an electronic engineer that used to love LabView and life long user of NI Reaktor and Max/MSP, those tools are fantastic if you don’t approach them with an imperative programming mindset.

aha, in the long run I ended up making https://ossia.io which is as VPL as it can get. Yet it still embeds a LOT of textual languages.

For me both VSCode and CLion lag heavily.. whenver I tried CLion it was completely unuseable on my project https://ossia.io which is only 500kloc (and I try to try it pretty much once a year since it was in beta)

https://ossia.io does some of it, I've been working on a new release that also supports the whole QtQuick stack in the node graph items but you can already combine videos & shader effects

In https://ossia.io with PCH, using clang, ninja, mold, and some artificial split in shared libraries for development builds, I get a compile-edit-run cycle of a couple seconds in general... I wouldn't say it's too much of a problem if you use the tools already available

If you're interested in multimedia https://ossia.io is always looking for new contributors!

Tools like Ossia Score, Chataigne and PureData (pd) can also help a ton in building interactive art and triggering other A/V software.

here's a simple example of how to do it in https://ossia.io score : https://streamable.com/wkklek

VCV Rack - Modular Synth

> It’s haven’t bought any Modular’s yet but I’m really looking forward to getting into other on the new year.

http://cardinal.kx.studio

https://vcvrack.com/

The former is libre and gratis, runs as a standalone or plugin and in the browser!! and is based on the latter.

Ther former has a libre and gratis standalone version, the plugin version is non-gratis.

A music synthesizer. It's a pathway to learning electronics, music, and the nature of sound. There are cheap kits, cheap synths, lots of kinds of synths, and there are much more complicated and expensive systems you can grow into. You can get software synths also, VCV Rack is a free though complex one:

https://vcvrack.com/

However I'd recommend an inexpensive hardware one with real knobs you can turn, like one of the Korg Volca series:

https://www.korg-volca.com/en/

Recording the sounds can lead into exploring all the concepts and gear involved in recording and mixing music. It's not mutually exclusive with doing other things also, you can play with both synths and computers and being involved with something artistic can add dimensions to and an escape from the nature of classwork/work.

Some other suggestions: gardening, high voltage electronics (with lots of supervision), electronics, photography, movie making, ham radio (gnu radio), show lighting systems (there's more than disco lights, robotics is involved), robotics, acoustic instruments (guitar, piano, flute, drums), sensors (you don't necessarily have to know electronics, get a data logger with built in sensors), weather monitoring/forecasting, hydraulic systems (with supervision), wood working, metal working, 3D printing, bird watching, painting, minibikes/small engines.

What really opened my eyes was the Nord Micromodular; it taught me what I just described. It showed me how limited other synths were - but that limitation was a trade-off because it's much faster to make something on a fixed-structure synth than on a modular, in most cases. Nowadays, you can use https://vcvrack.com/ instead of a small limited box that needs Windows 98 to run the editor on.

Also I would suggest the paid version of VCV rack which works as a VST too ( the free version is just stand alone ) Expecially when experimenting with modular ( believe me, it can save you a fortune whilst you learn what different modules do ) I would also recommend Omri Cohens Youtube channel for learning this too.