[Nyquist-users] Nyquist and multiple CPU's

[Roger D. <rb...@cs...>]

Nyquist does not have any way to take advantage of multiple CPU's other than
that audio output and file I/O might be handled on a separate processor
automatically by the OS.

In some ways, Nyquist is ideal for multiple CPU's because of its mainly
functional language approach with minimal side-effects and shared state. All
this exposes parallelism, e.g. every time you write (SIM (A) (B) ...) you
are essentially saying that (A) and (B) and ... can run in parallel.
Unfortunately, the lazy evaluation implementation and the hooks that (A) and
(B) have into the shared Lisp heap and garbage collection would make a
parallel implementation quite hairy (at least for me -- although Nyquist has
settled down after a lot of use, I'm still finding obscure and rare little
bugs in the single-threaded implementation!).

The rationale for multiple processors would be speed. There may be other
ways to speed up Nyquist. In particular, Nyquist control-rate signals can be
interpolated with inline code at the expense of a larger executable. At one
time, in-line interpolation was used everywhere, but I think I turned it off
because certain unit generators were getting huge. Probably, some
performance instrumentation could expose some areas for optimization.

-Roger