This is great! I've been trying to learn audio programming for ages and this (along with repo: https://github.com/yamadapc/augmented-audio) look like really fantastic resources!

I wish we would have something like JUCE but in Rust.

Some good work in this direction: https://github.com/robbert-vdh/nih-plug

Also, have a look at the vibrant Rust Audio community on Discord!

Is Rust a common choice for audio programming? What are the pros/cons?

From my experience also building a live looper in rust (https://github.com/mwylde/loopers):

Pros

- Rust is much more pleasant to write (for me at least) than C or C++

- lots of good libraries for the non-audio stuff (like lockless queues)

- the compiler checks for potential data races, making complex multithreaded programming much easier

- C++ audio plugins are notoriously unstable, rust makes it much easier to write reliable code

- easy custom allocator support to help prevent accidental allocations in the audio thread (which can potentially lock)

Cons

- the rust audio ecosystem is much less mature, so you’re going to need to figure out a lot of basic things yourself and potentially write patches for core libs like jack and core audio

- some stuff is more or less unsolved, like building audio plug-in GUIs

But overall, I think it’s totally worth it. Audio programming requires tight control over allocations and locking in order to ensure that the audio thread remains live, and generally needs high performance to stay within your latency budget. Rust makes it easier to achieve those goals without giving up safety and reliability.

> C++ audio plugins are notoriously unstable, rust makes it much easier to write reliable code

as the author of a C++ DAW (host), I would say that the biggest issues with plugins generally have little to do with the language they are written in, but their interactions with the host via the often ambiguous nature of the plugin API(s) semantics.

As an aside, other than (obviously) the first item you list, all of those "pro" things are available for a C++ plugin developer (not necessarily via the compiler; we use valgrind for example to do data race detection).

And as another aside, while a new developer may make some new developer errors when starting out with audio programming, reading Ross Bencina's paper (linked in TFA) will clear that stuff up fairly quickly. What it won't do is let you know that, for example random() in the C standard library may take a lock.

Pretty much a software Octatrack.

Thanks for sharing lukastyrychtr