Running Chuck program from iphone application

ganeshpisal · Joined: Dec 22, 2008 Posts: 1 Location: Pune, India

Hi,

I am trying to integrate chuck to my iphone application. How I can do this.?
I want to run one chuck program from iphone application.
Where I can find chuck's source code?

Regards,
Ganesh Pisal
Vavni Inc.

Inventor · Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 2:30 am Post subject:

You can find ChucK's source code here:

http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/

and please post to our ChucK forum, you'll get better answers there.

dewdrop_world · Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 6:06 am Post subject:

What is ChucK's license? If it's GPL, it may be illegal to link it into a commercial app.

James

Inventor · Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 6:46 am Post subject:

Good point James, it's GPL. Though I know that Ge has been working on an Iphone version of ChucK in some form or another, so if the poster would contact Ge, he might find some useful commercial collaboration.

Kassen · Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 10:26 am Post subject:

The Iphone doesn't have significant floating point performance, I think, and ChucK uses a LOT of floats everywhere. Getting it to build on the iPhone may not be easy.

Controlling it from a iPhone could work well though, OSC should do it and there are iPhone OSC applications. Starting ChucK remotely would likely require something like SSH but I don't think the iPhone supports SSH.

JohnG · Joined: Nov 18, 2008 Posts: 3 Location: Ireland

Some of the smule apps use chuck so it can certainly be done. The license would be a big problem as James mentioned.

On a related note, how have chuck and pd apps (rjdj) got past the apple approval process? I thought you were not allowed to run interpreted code.

Kassen · Posted: Wed Dec 24, 2008 9:42 am Post subject:

Yes... it could be done, clearly. But Smule involves Ge and he already knows the internal structure of ChucK and of course to him the license is less of a issue as he wrote most of it. There is nothing preventing Ge from licensing his work to us under the GPL while also selling parts of it to iPhone users.

It wouldn't be as simple as a few tweaks to the make file and compiling for iPhone. Even if you *could* do that performance would be terrible, at the very least all of the floating point stuff would need to be replaced with integer math.

ChucK, BTW, is not a interpreted language. It's a compiled language, it just compiles to a VM so your files will be in plain txt. I'm not sure how Apple would feel about the release of a VM, a compiler and a parser either. Probably they wouldn't be happy about that sort of thing but then again; there is no reason for applications like the lighter or the ocarina to involve a whole parser and compiler; just a section of the audio engine and schreduler with some IO would be enough.

I think what you want would mean a LOT of work of a highly specialised nature and you'd probably need to "jailbreak" your iPhone to get it on there right now. I wouldn't think it was worth it but I'm not sure how comfortable you are porting code to different chip-sets on different platforms. I'm sure there are people to whom that sounds like a fun hobby project...

Fist thing to do would be to start here; http://developer.apple.com/iphone/ and sign up as a developer for the iPhone.

Kassen · Posted: Wed Dec 24, 2008 9:46 am Post subject:

Also; I deleted your other topic on this same subject, I hope that will prevent confusion.

JohnG · Joined: Nov 18, 2008 Posts: 3 Location: Ireland

Clearly Ge can do what he wants with his own code, but the licensing point was in relation to the original poster. I know that the NDA has been dropped, but have open source IPhone apps surfaced yet? I don't remember seeing any that have gone through the app store. I'm not even sure if whatever Apple makes you agree to is GPL compliant.

Regarding chuck compilation, Java also compiles to a VM, and that is not allowed. So the question still remains.

Kassen · Posted: Wed Dec 24, 2008 11:47 am Post subject:

Those are good questions.

Could you, for example, distribute a app through the Apple store (for free) while also providing the source to this app on your own website? I think your probably could. Would that satisfy the GPL? I think it would; I get most of my programs as (Debian) packages and if/where needed the source would be available to me. I don't see how a free download to the iPhone would be different from getting a package (IANAL).

More practical; I think it's clear that Ge is very interested in developing for the iPhone and considering Smule's popularity. I think it's safe to assume he will know by now what you can and can't do. To avoid parallel efforts which will waste time and potentially lead to confusing situations I'd say that the best way to go about this would be for people that have the relevant skills to contact Ge and offer to help out instead of going at it solo. Alternately we could simply wait and see; if it's possible to get a complete version of ChucK on the iPhone I'm sure Ge is working on it already. I think it's clear that Ge is the largest expert on ChucK's internal workings and by now very familiar with the iPhone project; it makes little sense to work on this independently from him.

As a side-note; apart from novelty I personally don't really see the appeal of programming on the iPhone for any length of time; large screens, serious editors and quality keyboards all make coding *much* more pleasant. Using ChucK (or ChucK syntax), possibly with GlucK, to develop applications that will *run* on the iPhone on the other hand would be far more interesting to me. This could become possible in the future; Ge has previously hinted at the possibility of having ChucK compile to stand-alone applications, so why not have such applications that run of a platform like that?