Hey friends! This is a project I’ve been working on since the start of the year. We’ve just released 0.4.0, so I figured now would be a nice time to start making it a bit more public. There’s a bunch of interesting tech under the hood which I thought you all would definitely be interested in :) Axiom’s a project that grew out of my third try at building a realtime software synthesizer for 64k intros in the demoscene.…
Looks super slick, thanks for sharing! Can you give a little more detail in how this compares architecturally with something like PD? I imagine a tradeoff of generating LLVM MIR and compiling it is that you can get better performance, but don't get the interactive experience of hearing changes immediately as you tweak the object graph. Does the DSP graph operate on blocks or sample-by-sample?
I was initially worried about how interactive compiling would be, however it turns out (at least with the projects we've tested it with so far), it's pretty easily able to keep up with around 3ms from a modification to codegen being complete. The LLVM IR we generate is pretty simple which helps, and we also try to only recompile as much as possible by putting everything in separate LLVM modules (hurts runtime performance a bit since we can't optimize across modules, but it doesn't end up mattering too much).
The graph operates per sample - we really needed that feature to be able to do feedback loops, for things like FM synthesis.
Edit: I started adding in an explanation of Axioms architecture in the hope that someone with knowledge of similar projects could chime in, but it was getting quite long... might look at writing a blog post on it sometime soon, if people would find that interesting.