[linux-audio-dev] soft synth as a plugin

[Bill Schottstaedt]

>>indeed, for a plugin soft-synth, it would only ever make sense to write
>>it in c/c++ or assembler really, a question of speed. Are there really
>>people who seriously want to write a synth in aynthing else?

> OTOH, CLM is written in Lisp, (hence the name), and some modern Lisps
> (i.e. CMUCL) claim to be as fast as C for floats.  So I suppose you could write DSP
> code in Lisp if you really wanted to.

I did some timing tests in cmucl and was amazed at the performance
it was getting -- it is close to C, but (sigh... there's always
a catch), you have to be extremely explicit about types, so
all that beautiful lisp code gets buried under type declarations.
At least the cmucl guys are making progress in this area.

In normal use, CLM "instruments" are translated into C and
run as foreign functions (so all the DSP stuff is happening
at C speeds), and lisp provides an interactive environment
to work in (the "listener").

So, yes it is perfectly possible to do real-time synthesis
while writing the DSP-related code in Lisp/Scheme; there are
examples in both CLM and Snd.