Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by musesum 1332 days ago
To be honest, I've spent many hours in PD and Max and didn't realize that Miller Puckette was behind both. Super cool!

Next week, I travel to Bali to focus on developing a data flow based visual music synth. I can't understate how big an influence that Puckette's work has been on my thinking.
1 comments
singingfish 1332 days ago
Pukette got the shits with the conditions of his grant from the french government that allowed the development of Max, because it disallowed him to use the same techniques to do visual synthesis. So he quit and reimplemented the whole thing. Except this time he used an open source license.

The other advantage is because these things were implemented in the 80s when real time audio was a really big ask for computers, they are very computationally efficient.

link
spacechild1 1332 days ago
> The other advantage is because these things were implemented in the 80s

Pd was developed in the mid 90s

> they are very computationally efficient

Not as efficient as it could be, though. For example, instead of proper SIMD instructions, the DSP perform routines only use manual loop unrolling, praying that the compiler will auto-vectorize it.

Finally, everything is single-threaded, leaving lots of performance on the table. FWIW, I have a PR for an asynchronous task API (https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/pull/1357) and also a branch for multi-threaded DSP (https://github.com/Spacechild1/pure-data/tree/multi-threadin...).

link
singingfish 1331 days ago
> Pd was developed in the mid 90s

Fair enough. Life was still pretty computationally constrained until the mid 00s mind you, so there's still an efficiency dividend here.

Nice work on the patchsets by the way - well beyond my abilities :)

link
chaosprint 1332 days ago
Do you think rewriting pd in Rust can be a good solution?Async in Rust is one of its selling points:

https://rust-lang.github.io/async-book/

There are some good gui tools in Rust as well:

https://www.egui.rs/ https://github.com/setzer22/egui_node_graph

link
spacechild1 1332 days ago
No, I don't think that Rust would buy us anything in this regard.

"Async" in languages like Rust are meant for an entire different problem domain (mostly networking).

In my post above I'm talking about dispatching commands from the audio thread to a helper thread (pool) - and back. This has to be done in a realtime safe manner, so a general async framework won't be appropriate.

> There are some good gui tools in Rust as well:

I don't think GUI programming is exactly one of Rust's strengths :-)

link
chaosprint 1331 days ago
I see. Was just thinking aloud.
link
spacechild1 1331 days ago
(BTW, I did not downvote your comment. I know that you have actually written audio code in Rust and therefore assumed it was an honest question from your side :-)
link