pd-lua

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pdlua -- a Lua embedding for Pd Copyright (C) 2007,2008,2009,2013 Claude Heiland-Allen [email protected] Copyright (C) 2012 Martin Peach [email protected]

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

NOTES by aggraef: Since the contents of the original README has become rather outdated, I've updated the information below.

pdlua works with all Pd flavors out there and makes Pd external programming incredibly easy (please check the included examples and the tutorial in the corresponding subdirectories). Originally written by Claude Heiland-Allen, pdlua has gone through the hands of a few people over the years, including mrpeach (maintainer since 2011), zmoelnig a.k.a. umlaeute (loader update, Debian package), and myself (Arch package, Lua 5.3 support, tutorial). Please also check my brief account on the history of pd-lua below.

Lua 5.3 is highly recommended with the latest version, Lua 5.4 should work as well. Lua 5.2 probably still works, too, but this hasn't been tested recently. Even older Lua versions are completely untested and unsupported at this point - use at your own risk.

If you haven't used pdlua before, please make sure to check the included tutorial first. See:

https://agraef.github.io/pd-lua/tutorial/pd-lua-intro.html

This contains a fairly gentle introduction to pdlua, walks you through the creation of a basic example, and then goes on to cover all major features of pdlua, including the special facilities for tables, clocks, receivers, and live-coding, in quite some detail. This will be helpful when embarking on your own projects, or trying to make sense of the included examples.

History and Credits:

pdlua was originally written by Claude Heiland-Allen, with contributions by Frank Barknecht and Martin Peach, according to the original source.

Claude's repository is still online at https://code.mathr.co.uk/pdlua; please also check Claude's website at https://mathr.co.uk/, and https://mathr.co.uk/blog/lua.html for Lua-related content on his blog (including pdlua's original announcement).

Martin Peach took over maintenance of pdlua in 2011, you can find that part of the history in Pd's old svn repository at SourceForge, including IOhannes Zmölnig's loader update for Pd 0.47. See https://sourceforge.net/p/pure-data/svn/HEAD/tree/trunk/externals/loaders/pdlua/

The present source is a fork of umlaeute's repository at https://anonscm.debian.org/git/pkg-multimedia/pd-lua.git, from which the official Debian packages are built. This in turn is apparently based on the 0.7.3 version of pdlua in Pd's svn repository.

Compilation Instructions:

The source should compile out of the box on (at least) Linux, macOS and Windows, just make sure that you have Lua and Pd installed and run make. Ready-to-use binaries for the older Lua 5.1 and 5.2 versions are available from Deken and as a Debian package, respectively. The latest (Lua 5.3) binaries are on https://github.com/agraef/pd-lua.

If you want/need to compile from source, the following details the requirements for the three most popular platforms.

Linux:

Both Lua 5.3 and Pd should be available in your package repositories, if not then they're easy to install from source, cf. https://www.lua.org/download.html and http://msp.ucsd.edu/software.html.

macOS/OS X:

Lua 5.3 is available in Homebrew (https://brew.sh/) and MacPorts (https://www.macports.org/), but it's also easy to install from source once you have XCode up and running. As distributed, the build requires that you have the Pd header files somewhere under /Applications/Pd-*/Contents /Resources/include (which should be the case if you're running a recent Pd distribution by MSP); otherwise you may have to set the PD_INCLUDE make variable accordingly.

Windows:

Compilation is a breeze using mingw (either the old one at http://mingw.org/ or the new msys2-based installation at http://www.msys2.org/). The Lua that ships with msys2 is still 5.2 at the time of this writing, so you'll want to compile Lua 5.3 from source and install it in the mingw environment using make install. The build also assumes that you have a recent Pd installation as distributed by MSP, please check the comments in the mingw section of the Makefile for details. This is necessary so that the header files and pd.dll are found during compilation and linkage, respectively.

Installation:

After a successful compile, you can go about installing the external with the usual make install (which copies the external to its own directory named pdlua). This should generally do something sensible on each of the supported platforms. Note that the installation may require root privileges.

Linux: By default, installation goes into /usr/local/lib/pd/extra, which should be one of the directories on Pd's search path.

macOS/OS X: Installation goes into ~/Library/Pd by default. Move the pdlua folder to /Library/Pd for a system-wide installation.

Windows/mingw: Installation goes into the extra subdirectory of your Pd installation, so it will be available to all users by default.

It's generally advisable to do a staged install using DESTDIR first so that you can review the installation directory layout beforehand and adjust it if needed. To these ends, run make install, e.g., as follows:

make install DESTDIR=$PWD/BUILD

This will leave the installed external in a folder BUILD inside the current directory from where you can move the pdlua subdirectory to any location on Pd's library search path that you see fit.

Finally, having finished installation, to enable pd-lua in Pd just add pdlua to your startup libraries (after adding its parent directory to Pd's search path if necessary) and you should be set.