Dr. B. – yes, we were discussing this last month (or longer?) during the Zoom meeting, if you remember. The perception in many quarters that Csound is “old” or “a dead project” is lamentable.
Promoting Csound is something I regularly do. It stands up so well against so many commercial products, and other open source offerings, too, but it doesn’t have the “mindshare”, let’s call it, that other projects do. Glad to hear that a new generation of game designers recognize its power.
An aside: it’s just a lamentable thing in general that in tech, a project is considered “dead” or abandoned if there haven’t been updates in several months. The struggle/pressure to fight that perception is real. That said, it would be awesome to have a new release sooner than later to change that perception.
Aside-aside: I learned some things in the “diet csound” project that the main devs might consider useful in the form of a pull request at some point (assuming it was welcome) – even though the main goal of the “diet csound” is a more “customizable/minimalist” release, I also reorganized a few things in a way that felt cleaner and more logical (specifically, opcodes that are logical related should logically live together in the codebase, and there are several files in the main repo that simply defy this principle). As well, unifying the process of registering all opcodes in the “new style” used by extensions/plugins would be nice and make the code more understandable across-the-board. I think something like that might attract more folks into trying their hand at assisting in the development of Csound, which keeps the enthusiasm and activity within the community high. There’s no reason something with the current visibility and vogue of VCVRack, which makes it easy for folks to make plugins, couldn’t be applied to Csound’s code. People should be encouraged to extend, customize it, own it…that’s how you give an open source project new life. But first – the code has to be really cleaned up, IMO. It’s amazing, it works, but it’s, well, chaotic in a way that represents decades of cruft.
Things like faust, where I can make a new opcode easily, and faust opcodes, where I could write embedded faust code, and interoperability with PD/Max are wise, too – take advantage of the ability of being able to coexist with other popular DSP tools in a way that feels like an alloy…
