[PD] Lua and PD

Frank Barknecht fbar at footils.org
Wed Mar 5 09:45:47 CET 2008


Hallo,
Claude Heiland-Allen hat gesagt: // Claude Heiland-Allen wrote:

> Mike McGonagle wrote:
> > Wow Claude, last night I rewrote several of my old externals that were 
> > originally in C, in Lua last night... And they required about 1/4 of the 
> > code that C requires. I am pretty much sold on using Lua now...
> 
> Cool :-)

> > I guess one of the things that seemed to scream out at me was "How would 
> > Lua and PD work together"? 

My opinion: pdlua is the best thing that happend to Pd since [list]. 

That's quite a mouthful but I'm serious about that. IMO Miller should
bundle lua with pd-vanilla just like [expr]: It only requires ANSI-C,
and the statically linked binary is about the same size as
expr.pd_linux while being so much more expressive (pun not intended).
Lua (the language) and Pd share a lot of philosophical viewpoints,
like scepticism in regard to threads, the "compact is better than
complicated" approach, easy extensibility, simple syntax, etc. If you
read for example the chapter on modules and namespaces in the Lua
PiL-book a lot of similarities turn up. Pd might be able to learn more
from Lua in this than from languages like Python or Java. 

> > 4. Are there things that you wouldn't do in Lua? For performance 
> > reasons? Other reasons?
> 
> Vast amounts of number crunching, for performance reasons.  This 
> includes DSP at the moment, although hopefully Frank's port of 
> Lua~/Vessel~ is a viable alternative (not sure what the current status 
> of that is).

It is working fairly well and now that LAC is almost over I intend to
work more on it as I want to use it in a project. Vessel is quite
fast: All synthesis and number crunching happens in a C-library, while
Lua just serves as a kind of text based patching environment for
dynamically generating the dsp graphs. This is very handy for granular
synthesis or any other tasks that require lots of polyphony. So Vessel
can do things that are nearly impossible with Pd patching alone.

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                                     _ ______footils.org__




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