Designing and Implementing the Chuck Programming Language

ChucK re-factors the idea of a computer music language into three orthogonal basis components: unit generator connections that are data-flow only, globally consistent ”first-class” time control, and sample-synchronous concurrency. The syntax, semantic, and usage have been discussed in previous works. The focus and contributions of this paper are (1) to examine the philosophies and decisions in the language design (2) to describe ChucK’s implementation and runtime model, and (3) to outline potential applications enabled by this framework. We present an experiment in designing a computer music language ”from scratch” and show how things work. We hope these ideas may provides an interesting reference for future computer music systems.