Why Ciaramella?

[stefano]

We want to start collecting use cases and reasons why you're interested in the language, so that we can develop it further in meaningful directions first.

As explained in this blog post we first developed it to scratch an itch of ours, that is implementing state-space models with having to worry about all the needed boilerplate code, and have different output targets (mostly C and Matlab/Octave). So far, it deals with the linear part of such systems brilliantly, and manual intervention is needed on the output for the nonlinear part. Of course we want to sort that out too, that's the main reason behind the current work on conditionals and future work on iterative loops and importing of external code.

In the near future we also plan to use it as a compositional tool for Brickworks modules, so we need to be able to import stateful C code as well (we need to define mechanisms for that, of course, but it's doable, at least as long as the output is also C... well, that could also be generalized, but I digress now).

So far, we had feedback from @chowdsp, who has been testing it to implement wave digital filters, and I guess that @algoravioli might want to use it to implement neural networks. Also, we received more feedback regarding wave digital filters, remote CI/CD on hardware devices, and even for state-preserving live coding.

Also, since it works beautifully in the browser and we've done quite a lot of work on WebAudio etc., one of the possible developments is to make it as simple and effective to use on the web as possible (I think this might be fantastic to share algorithms for scientific papers, for example).

So, many possible development paths, but our time is limited. That's why I'm asking you what you want to do with it and what hurts you the most with current languages/environments, so that we can get that fixed first.

Of course, if you want to help we're more than happy and we should be able to arrange cooperation.