Re: Insight needed: Perl, C, Gtk2, Audio, Threads, IPC & Performance - Oh My!

[kvale]

Processing audio in straight perl can be pretty slow; traversing the parse tree takes a good deal of time, to the point that operations like regex matching have their own hand-optimized C engines.

One alternative to generic perl that is great for processing vector data (like audio streams) is the Perl Data Language, or PDL. The vector and matrix operations are implemented in highly optimized C code and are programmed in a Matlab-like dialect that makes it easy to express DSP algorithms.

[Joost]

I am aware of PDL :-) I don't actually do any audio processing in perl itself (though the API allows it) - the plugins written in C take care of all the audio data (except for a few conversions to Audio::Play, but even that is mostly C code).

The perl based plugins only do "control channels", that is - they generate only 1 float per channel each "tick" (with ticks once every 40 .. 200 samples). PDL can't really help with the control data, I think, since you're not acting on arrays of numbers, only single values.

I do see there's now a PDL::Audio module on CPAN. That wasn't there when I started this (2 years ago). I'll have to check it out.