agraef/pd-lua - Githubissues

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.

Current maintainer: Albert Gräf aggraef@gmail.com This source is available on GitHub: https://github.com/agraef/pd-lua

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, Purr Data and plugdata support, pdx.lua live-coding extension, tutorial). Please also check my brief account on the history of pd-lua below.

Lua 5.4 is highly recommended with the latest version, Lua 5.3 works as well. Reportedly, Lua 5.2 and even 5.1 still work (at least to some extent), but I haven't tested these myself for quite a while, so you may run into problems with these old versions - 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 most major features of pdlua, including the special facilities for tables, clocks, receivers, signal processing, graphics, 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. Please 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 0.7.3 version in the Debian package repository at https://anonscm.debian.org/git/pkg-multimedia/pd-lua.git, which in turn was based on the 0.7.3 version of pdlua in Pd's svn repository.

The current version (0.8 and later) is actively maintained by Albert Gräf, with contributions by many people: Claude Heiland-Allen (Lua 5.4 update, bugfixes), Alexandre Porres (documentation updates), sebshader (relative path loading), Timothy Schoen (plugdata compatibility, signal and graphics support), and Ben Wesch (multi-channel signal support, Deken tests and uploads on GitHub). This is also the version included in Purr Data (https://github.com/agraef/purr-data) and Timothy Schoen's plugdata (https://github.com/plugdata-team/plugdata).

Please file bugs and requests at https://github.com/agraef/pd-lua. I maintain a lot of packages and thus it may take a while at times, but I look at all the bug reports and pull requests, and try to respond to them eventually. :)

Ready-Made Packages:

The latest vanilla binaries for Ubuntu, Mac, and Windows can always be found on https://github.com/agraef/pd-lua (but see below for the Deken package). Also, both Purr Data and plugdata ship with pdlua, and have it enabled by default, so no 3rd party package is needed in those environments.

For vanilla Pd, we recommend installing the Deken package (named pdlua), readily available using Pd's Find externals menu option. This package was originally uploaded by Alexandre Porres, but Ben Wesch recently added Deken tests and uploads to our GitHub workflow, so that the Deken releases are now automatized and always in sync with the GitHub releases. Thanks, Ben!

pd-lua is also in the Arch repositories (maintained by dvzrv, thanks David!), and in the Debian repositories (maintained by IOhannes Zmölnig, thanks umlaeute!). (During busy times, these may trail our releases for a little bit, but most of the time they will the latest version.)

Mac users please note that the packages I distribute aren't notarized, so on recent macOS versions you'll have to jump through the usual hoops to make them usable. Running xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine on pdlua.pd_darwin should usually do the trick, but check the internet for up-to-date information on Gatekeeper for details.

Enabling pdlua:

Again, this step is only necessary with vanilla Pd; both Purr Data and plugdata have the pdlua loader enabled by default, so it should be ready to go immediately.

With vanilla Pd, after installing pdlua, the pdlua loader also needs to be added to your startup libraries, before Pd will recognize any Lua object in your patches. This only needs to be done once. (Alternatively, you can also use the -lib pdlua option on the Pd command line, or a declare -lib pdlua object in a patch with Lua objects.) To make any of this work, you may also have to add the parent directory of the pdlua folder to Pd's search path if pdlua was installed in an unusual location.

Compilation Instructions:

You can also compile pdlua yourself from source, which isn't hard to do.

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. pdlua uses pd-lib-builder by Katja Vetter as its build system, please check https://github.com/pure-data/pd-lib-builder and the included Makefile.pdlibbuilder for details.

pdlua works with any reasonably modern Pd flavour, but pd-lib-builder will look for vanilla Pd (http://msp.ucsd.edu/software.html). So you'll need to have that installed, or be prepared to adjust the Makefile accordingly.

If you compile from git sources and use the included lua submodule (see Compilation from Git Sources below), then only Pd will be needed. Otherwise you'll also have to install Lua (https://www.lua.org).

The following build environments on various platforms are known to work and are supported.

Linux: Uses gcc and GNU make. Pd and Lua should be available in your package repositories. If not then it's easy to install them from source.

Mac: Uses Xcode. The build requires that you have the Pd header files somewhere under /Applications/Pd-*/Contents/Resources/src (which should be the case if you're running a recent Pd distribution by MSP); otherwise you can set the PDINCLUDEDIR make variable accordingly. Lua is available, e.g., in Homebrew (https://brew.sh/).

Windows: Uses msys2/mingw (https://www.msys2.org/), which is the Windows incarnation of gcc and GNU make. The build assumes that you have a recent Pd installation as distributed by MSP, so that the header files and pd.dll are found during compilation and linkage, respectively. Lua is available in msys2.

Compilation from Git Sources:

The repository source includes a lua submodule which can be used to compile Lua alongside pdlua, so no Lua installation is needed to compile the external. (You'll still need to have Pd installed.) Just make sure to check out the submodule with the repository (git clone --recurse-submodules). If you already checked out the repository, you can also do git submodule update --init instead. This should get you a fairly recent revision of the upstream Lua source.

Once the lua submodule is checked out, you can just run make as usual, it will use the submodule to compile Lua alongside the pdlua module. The resulting binary will be statically linked with the Lua interpreter.

Also note that on the Mac you can build a universal (a.k.a. arm64+x86_64) binary this way, using arch="arm64 x86_64" when running make. This will work best if Lua is compiled alongside pdlua, since installed Lua libraries may not be universal binaries (in Homebrew at least they aren't).

Otherwise, if the lua submodule isn't checked out, make will try pkg-config to locate an existing Lua installation on your system and link against that.

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-externals, which should be one of the directories on Pd's built-in search path.

Mac: 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 Pd subdirectory of your %APPDATA% folder by default. Move the pdlua folder to the extra folder of Pd in your ProgramFiles directory for a system-wide installation.

In any case, it's possible to override the default installation directory using the PDLIBDIR variable. E.g., on Linux you can install into Pd's /usr/lib/pd/extra folder as follows:

make install PDLIBDIR=/usr/lib/pd/extra

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=./build

It is possible to use DESTDIR along with PDLIBDIR.

Another possibility is to run make install objectsdir=./build which creates the pdlua folder directly in the build directory from where you can move it to any location on Pd's library search path that you see fit. (This option is considered deprecated, but it's still the most convenient for a quick manual installation.)

agraef / pd-lua

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