On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 12:00 AM, Stéphane Letz <letz@grame.fr> wrote:
> >
> > The idea of using a specialized audio "shader" language is an attractive
> one. I'm not sure that WebCL is the right language because there are some
> security issues surrounding it, and I think its future is unclear. If we
> look at some other choices, there are other audio languages that have been
> developed over the decades. You mention Chuck, but there's also CSound,
> SuperCollider, Faust, MPEG-4's SAOL, and others.
> >
> > In some ways SAOL (or a stripped down version of it) seems like the type
> of thing we would want. If such a language were chosen, then it would have
> to be shown to be totally secure to run in a browser environment. Going
> through the process of specifying the language and writing the run-time
> implementation would involve an enormous effort.
> >
> > That's why the idea of processing in JavaScript is so attractive,
> because it's a language that web developers know, has solved the security
> issues, and has implementations on all the browsers already.
> Unfortunately, it's not as well suited to more real-time applications, but
> it's still very interesting and useful I think.
> >
> > Chris
> >
>
> We would like to possibly experiment with Faust (that has a library
> version + a LLVM IR backend). How complex would it be to "hack" the WebCore
> Web Audio code and add a custom Faust audio node?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Stéphane Letz
Hi Stéphane, this is interesting stuff! WebKit is pretty hackable, and
there are definitely pretty targeted places in the Web Audio implementation
there to create a specialized AudioNode, etc. I can help you offline to
give you some general ideas for how to do it. In the early days, the Web
Audio API implementation itself was much more experimental and something I
effectively "hacked" into WebKit. I worked on a local branch on my machine
for awhile, and then a special audio branch in WebKit before the work was
polished enough to be at the stage where the code could land in the main
WebKit branch.
Chris