Enhancing your MIDI devices with Perl

https://fuzzix.org/enhancing-midi-hardware-with-perl

by oalders • 1 year ago

122 40 1 year ago

There's some confusion at the end of TFA about latency.

What TFA refers to as latency is the time required to inject a MIDI event/message received by RtMIDI into the perl async object - basically inter-thread wakeup. You certainly expect that to be very, very fast - it's what context switching on any multitasking/multithreaded system relies. "Fractions of a millisecond" is in the right ballpark, though on some systems "Tens of microseconds" would be more appropriate as a description.

What "latency" normally means in the context of MIDI or audio is the delay between the user generating a MIDI event somehow and when the audio corresponding to that MIDI event (e.g. a note) is audible. This is typically measured in relatively small numbers of milliseconds (e.g. 1-30).

These are not really connected in any meaningful sense.

montag• 1 year ago

Why “TFA” instead of just “the article”? I understand “RTFA”, berating commenters who didn’t “read the fucking article” with a cheeky acronym, but TFA by itself is kind of hostile for no reason. Unless you hated the article that much

Tepix• 1 year ago

In my mind, RTFM is read the fucking manual, but TFA is the fine article.

It seems to be confusing however, because it's been discussed here previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29888845

JodieBenitez• 1 year ago

I thought it was "Read The Fantastic Manual" ;)

randmeerkat2• 1 year ago

People still use Perl?

weare138• 1 year ago

I do.

davewood• 1 year ago

So do I

mkolassa• 1 year ago

Perl is a great scripting language to stitch together high performance C binaries. Not to mention that CPAN and the built in debugger are awesome.

Write it in Perl to deploy quickly and replace pieces with optimized binaries as needed.

It’s still used for new projects in far more places than a lot of people might realize.

fallous• 1 year ago

Yes. A mature and well-understood tool does not cease to exist nor cease to be useful simply because new tools exist.

Simply being "new" does not mean "better," except for those who merely seek novelty.

dutchbookmaker• 1 year ago

I always hated Perl.

This library does sound interesting and maybe Perl would be less painful for me now with a language model.

The article is great right until it gets into the perl code.

My brain just turns off and my eyes want to cross.

IshKebab4• 1 year ago

Old people who don't want to learn new things... (We'll get downvoted but it's true.)

brtastic2• 1 year ago

I'm not old, I know other things. Still, I use Perl.

ab5tract2• 1 year ago

This kind of closed mindedness is part of a huge shift in programming culture since the heydays of Perl.

Someone can post a tortured looking piece of awk code here and people applaud. Post the same thing being done in Perl and we are likely to see comments like these — despite the fact that the Perl version will almost certainly be more readable and maintainable than anything you can write in awk.

It’s sad to see this happen to such a revolutionary-for-its-time language.

craigmcnamara• 1 year ago

This looks like a rad API

bandrami• 1 year ago

I do, all the time

toast0• 1 year ago

What else are you going to use to list ecclectic rubish?

grav• 1 year ago

Couldn't get the code to run with Perl on Mac:

   $ plenv exec perl midi.pl
   Not enough arguments for main::pedal_notes at midi.pl line 107, near "$note)"
   BEGIN not safe after errors--compilation aborted at midi.pl line 150.

I got something similar working in Supercollider though, which has a lot of tools for these sort of things, eg:

   MIDIIn.addFuncTo(\noteOn, ~myNoteOnHandler);

Enhancing your MIDI devices with Perl

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