Re: Re: Announce: scnim - Write SuperCollider UGens in Nim (Proof of Concept)

This is cool Carlo, thanks for sharing! If you get it into a state where
you feel it's polished we could add a link to the website.

> Nim is a bit different than most contenders because it actually generates
> (at your option) C or C++ code, and that code is fairly readable.

In fact, the original C++ compiler implementation transpiled into C. :)

-Brian

On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 10:50 AM, <carlo-3+kk896uEWp9MqFnZXqmrwC/[email protected]> wrote:

> >Hi Carlo,
> >
> >this is an exciting project, thanks for sharing. Nim seems to be an
> >interesting language as well. A while ago, I thought about something
> >like this with Scala Native (http://www.scala-native.org/en/latest/),
> >although I had considered rather to see how to difficult it would be to
> >implement part of the server API, rather than writing UGens that could
> >then be linked back into scsynth. Your documentation will be very useful
> >for similar attempts. Have you gathered any insight into the performance
> >of using Nim for the UGens?
> >
> >best, .h.h.
>
> Pleasure!
>
> Nim is a bit different than most contenders because it actually generates
> (at your option) C or C++ code, and that code is fairly readable. Below is
> Nim's C++ result of the "next" procedure. The scary-looking stuff at the
> bottom is just explicit type casts that Nim insist you do, and those have
> zero impact. The rest is just a loop in C, and those have been tinkered
> with
> by compiler optimizers for 30 years. So I think we can safely say that if
> you use the same rules to write UGens in Nim compared to C++ (don't
> allocate
> memory, use linear data structures like arrays), there is no (zero, none)
> performance hit.
>
> float* input = (*(*unit).mInBuf);
> float* output = (*(*unit).mOutBuf);
>   NI32 i;
>   i = (NI32)0;
>   NI32 res = ((NI32) 0);
>   {
>     while (1) {
>       if (!(res <= numSamples)) goto LA3;
>       i = res;
>       (*((float*) ((NI)((NU64)(((NI) (ptrdiff_t) (output))) +
> (NU64)((NI)(((NI) (i)) * ((NI) 4))))))) = (*float*) ((NI)((NU64)(((NI)
> (ptrdiff_t) (input))) + (NU64)((NI)(((NI) (i)) * ((NI) 4)))))));
>       res += ((NI) 1);
>     } LA3: ;
>   }
> }
>
> The same applies to sharing data- in this case, the input buffer is created
> in scsynth in C++, passed to Nim-generated C++ code, worked on, and
> returned- nothing is copied anywhere or restructured or anything. You can
> look at Nim as tool to help you write efficient C or C++ code. The price
> you
> pay is in build time and understanding how to write the interface- but once
> it's all compiled, you get the same CPU instructions and the same memory
> layout, so you get the same performance.
>
>
>
>
>
> --
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