jonathanhogg / flitter

A functional programming language and declarative system for describing 2D and 3D visuals
https://flitter.readthedocs.io
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License
40 stars 1 forks source link
ableton-push2 dmx flitterlang glsl language lasers lighting-control live-coding live-performance live-visuals livecoding midi-controller opengl visuals

Screenshot from a Flitter program showing colourful distorted ellipse shapes
with trails moving outwards from the centre of the screen.

Flitter

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Flitter is a functional programming language and declarative system for describing 2D and 3D visuals. It is designed to encourage an iterative, explorative, play-based approach to constructing visuals.

The language supports the basic range of functional language features: first-class recursive and anonymous functions, comprehensions, let/where, conditional expressions, lists ("vectors"). However, unusually, all values are vectors and all operators are element-wise, and the language is built around constructing trees of attributed nodes. The language is designed to be familiar to Python programmers.

The engine is able to live reload all code and assets (including any shaders, images, videos, models, etc.) while retaining the current system state - thus supporting live-coding. It also has support for interacting with running programs via MIDI surfaces (plus basic pointer and keyboard support).

Flitter is implemented in a mix of Python and Cython and requires at least OpenGL 3.3 (Core Profile) or OpenGL ES 3.0. At least Python 3.10 is also required as the code uses match/case syntax.

Flitter is designed for expressivity and ease of engine development over raw performance, but is fast enough to be able to do interesting things.

The engine that runs the language is capable of:

Flitter also has a plug-in architecture that allows extension with new image and 3D mesh generators, MIDI and DMX interfaces, or completely novel input and output systems.

Installation

Flitter can be installed from the flitter-lang PyPI package with:

pip3 install flitter-lang

and then run as:

flitter path/to/some/flitter/script.fl

More details can be found in the installation documentation.

Documentation

The documentation is available on Read the Docs.

There are a few quick examples in the main repository. However, there is also a separate repo containing many more interesting examples that are worth checking out.

License

Flitter is copyright © Jonathan Hogg and licensed under a 2-clause "simplified" BSD license except for the OpenSimplex 2S noise implementation, which is based on code copyright © A. Svensson and licensed under an MIT license.