[comp.sys.next] Music boxes

pardo@june.cs.washington.edu (David Keppel) (10/22/88)

In article <2881@sugar.uu.net> peter@sugar.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>[ For the comp.sys.next people, they've been talking about using NeXT as
>  a realtime music synthesiser, based on the DSP chip... ]
>
>One thing to consider. The NeXT machine is running [Mach],
>which is not a realtime operating system. A synth is a pretty hard-
>realtime environment.

There are at least two music synthesis systems that I am aware of that
run in real time under Smalltalk.  Smallktalk is not a real-time
environment either and you *can* get glitches, but modern Smalltalk
mostly do incremental garbage collection and are smart about
explicitly freeing (compiler-)recognizable garbage.

It might be a problem on the NeXT box, but I doubt it.

	;-D on  ( Bias, bias, bias, how about some equalization? )  Pardo
-- 
		    pardo@cs.washington.edu
    {rutgers,cornell,ucsd,ubc-cs,tektronix}!uw-beaver!june!pardo