Once I tried to start a fair discussion... :)

[cesare]

(removed apple rant)

I wish you all the best with your language but I am skeptical. C++ has not been the king of performance, even though an abomination as well syntax wise, for no reason. But then it is always great to have alternatives that make life easier.

Hey, skepticism is good, i'm all for that, a bit of critical analysis never did any harm.

At the moment, we are working towards v1, with limited hardware support, and limited library code, so it's not exactly compelling. I think people who 'get it' at the moment are excited about the possibilities it implies, not the current state of the language and library code. Now if we roll on another year, and there's a growing library of community supplied algorithms, and support in the major OSes (including an open source implementation) then i'm guessing it'd suddenly become of more interest?

Cesare

BTW, on the apple rant stuff, i'm no fanboy, but i've been buying their overpriced machines since 1995 They have made some great calls as well as some daft ones over the years. It's easy to fixate on the bits that annoy you rather than seeing the bigger picture. Has anyone else managed to make computing cool to the wider population?

[xhunaudio]

...than seeing the bigger picture. Has anyone else managed to make computing cool to the wider population?

Eheh, what a great "bigger picture" vision/step in computer-science history... Please...
( Just a quip, no polemics ! )

Cesare, may I ask if Jules'/your video about SOUL's "first public synth" programming tutorial (the one you should have published in time for the latest ADC, but you didn't because of a technical problem) is now ready ?

I forgot to ask about it in the passed weeks...

[cesare]

Cesare, may I ask if Jules'/your video about SOUL's "first public synth" programming tutorial (the one you should have published in time for the latest ADC, but you didn't because of a technical problem) is now ready ?

We've got a plan to record some stuff next Monday, so hopefully it'll be out soon. Sorry, it's just taken us longer to recover from ADC, and also the holiday season has caused a delay on getting stuff out!

Cesare

[xhunaudio]

Ok thank you,

don't forget to leave a post here when it's done !

[cesare]

It's just gone live here:

[xhunaudio]

After a 1h:30m full immersion, my congrats to you Cesare and Jules for your hard work. SOUL seems to proceed just fine !

One of my first questions was if you were planning to join forces with a company like Cycling74 to get a full, integrated realtime IDE (inside Max) for SOUL... but it seems (from your words in the video and from what I can see on SOUL.dev) that you are planning to make that real-time IDE your own (with also an editable "Audio Graph" and similar features), and this is exactly what I expect for the "future of development".

Great job, if you'll have more details/videos in the future, leave a post here !

[puffin]

Oh, what an interesting project! I remember having ranted embarrasingly on KVR, asking this forum for a music programming language, because I was so frustrated. viewtopic.php?f=33&t=488011

I just thought I'll search how embarrassing I was, and now there is this thread here and a music programming language!

I love it.

Though, somewhere in this thread is a statement saying that computers will become more heterogenous, and faster instructions and SIMD will be still a thing and will increase? I was hoping for the opposite. I found Golang to be the best option for me to write basic things and because I like things looking easy (and there's no support for fast inlined code), I wish I could just buy a cheap 16 core machine. But not so much a AVX1024 or so. Just something from AMD. Then found out I need to invest $1000 just to get a machine only 4x faster (via more cores) than mine. Sigh.

Anyways what a great project.

Though, this EULA? It's big. I'm not sure if it contains the viral part, I mean the terms that are shared alike. Somewhere the SOUL repo says that it's being licensed as a permissive ISC, which, Google says, is a shorter version of BSD.

And that EULA is ..huge? And says I should not copy the software except for normal use, not saying what normal use is. And some parental control topic. Is that all just the agreement to the JUCE team or will that stand in every derived work?

https://github.com/soul-lang/SOUL/blob/ ... UL-EULA.md

If anything of this involves me giving the JUCE team my home address, my search for such a language will go on.

[cesare]

One of my first questions was if you were planning to join forces with a company like Cycling74 to get a full, integrated realtime IDE (inside Max) for SOUL... but it seems (from your words in the video and from what I can see on SOUL.dev) that you are planning to make that real-time IDE your own (with also an editable "Audio Graph" and similar features), and this is exactly what I expect for the "future of development".

Right, yes, i'd expect us to develop a GUI based editor for soulpatches, as this makes a lot of sense. Realistically, very few people are going to be writing SOUL, instead they are going to import and plumb together pre-existing SOUL code snippets, which is basically a sound designer-centric approach rather than a programmer-centric one.

Will Cycling74 support SOUL in their products? Hopefully, yes, and there are lots of ways of thinking about this, from them adopting SOUL through to them outputting SOUL, and fitting into our backend. It would give their user base more options about where to run their patches, and that can't be a bad thing.

We already have that sort of support in place with Faust, and I think we should see more efforts like this over time as we make further progress and prove the value of the language and the runtime.

[cesare]

Though, this EULA? It's big. I'm not sure if it contains the viral part, I mean the terms that are shared alike. Somewhere the SOUL repo says that it's being licensed as a permissive ISC, which, Google says, is a shorter version of BSD.

The source code is distributed under the ISC licence, whilst the binaries are distributed under a different licence. Yes, it's wordy, but that's what happens when lawyers get involved, but it should boil down to:

1) You can do anything you like with the source code, and I mean anything. You can build competing products with it, embed it where you want, and make your own changes that you keep private. We don't make any guarantees about the code though, so don't come crying to us if it doesn't work properly.

2) You can distribute the binary releases as part of your products without restriction. You promise not to reverse engineer the executables/libraries, and again, like the source code, if it does wrong it's your problem, not ours.

3) You can refer to SOUL in your product in relation to supporting SOUL without restriction, so that means it can be in your documentation, online marketing material and within the product GUI itself.


So although it's long, the intention of the EULA is to make it clear what freedoms you have, rather than to add restrictions. My interpretation above is however just that, and if you really are concerned you'll want to get your own lawyer to look them over.

[cesare]

I wish I could just buy a cheap 16 core machine.

Well, my advice if you want to explore large core count machines is to surf the older generation of Intel Xeons. The original E5 and E5 v2 processors are very cost effective ways of getting higher core counts, and if you get a dual socket machine, you can easily get 16 cores for little money.

I'd recommend HP servers and workstations for this.

For servers, the HP DL380 Gen8 are excellent value, and will often come with suitable processors. Since they are industry standard, there are tonnes of them out there with resellers as they are end of life for datacentre use, but great for a home lab.

For workstations, the HP Z620 is my preferred option, but you need to ensure you have the daughtercard for dual socket, and the right BIOS if you want v2 processors. They both take cheap as chips DDR3 registered DIMMS so getting plenty of ram into them is easy and cost effective.

[xhunaudio]

One of my first questions was if you were planning to join forces with a company like Cycling74 to get a full, integrated realtime IDE (inside Max) for SOUL... but it seems (from your words in the video and from what I can see on SOUL.dev) that you are planning to make that real-time IDE your own (with also an editable "Audio Graph" and similar features), and this is exactly what I expect for the "future of development".

Right, yes, i'd expect us to develop a GUI based editor for soulpatches, as this makes a lot of sense. Realistically, very few people are going to be writing SOUL, instead they are going to import and plumb together pre-existing SOUL code snippets, which is basically a sound designer-centric approach rather than a programmer-centric one.

Will Cycling74 support SOUL in their products? Hopefully, yes, and there are lots of ways of thinking about this, from them adopting SOUL through to them outputting SOUL, and fitting into our backend. It would give their user base more options about where to run their patches, and that can't be a bad thing.

We already have that sort of support in place with Faust, and I think we should see more efforts like this over time as we make further progress and prove the value of the language and the runtime.

Really nice to know all this :
- a full, integrated, GUI based editor/IDE
- the terms under which SOUL is released
- and the fact all of this is leaded by a solid company (instead of being simply an ambitious open-source project prototype/concept).

I feel it could be a real game changer in development, perfectly suited for audio. Congrats again and keep up the good work !

[xhunaudio]

Hi Jules and Cesare,

after learning about ROLI's recent abandonment of JUCE (sold to PACE) and after reading Jules' public comments about this, it seems you are now spending 100% of your time developing SOUL. May I ask how things proceed ?

If ROLI sold JUCE and concentrated all its efforts on SOUL (and its game-changing approach over JUCE/Standard C++ development), I thought things are proceeding very fine...

(months have passed since the last post on this thread, I wish you'll be aware of my question)

[cesare]

Hi, yes we're working on SOUL full time, and this is unaffected by the change in JUCE ownership.

Since the last post we've released a few more updates, and have been mainly working on 'behind the scenes' stuff which isn't really adding to the language, but is paving the way for some good stuff in the future.

The c++ code generator has been re-worked, and this means there is now a JUCE project exporter included in the soul binary, which means you can jump from a soul patch straight to a projucer project to build the DSP as a plugin.

The wasm backend has also had a fair bit of work, simplifying how it behaves, and this will hopefully make it easier to incorporate SOUL based audio processing into web pages.

[xhunaudio]

Thank you Cesare, any further news about the Industry reaction (to SOUL) is welcome.
Keep up the good work Cesare, all the best !

[xhunaudio]

Hi Jules and Cesare (SOUL Team),

on GitHub it seems things are proceeding fine with SOUL. Unfortunately since the January no other announcements have been made on your side.

So, since I think it would be great to know about SOUL progresses, is there something new you want to share?

Is out there any other (more often updated) topic/discussion about SOUL ? (for example, on ROLI website)

Are you going to make any SOUL announcement @ADC 2020 ?

Thank you, answer in your spare time