While I do love programming in C, I'm much less enthralled lately by C++. In any case, I'm constantly finding myself stuck with these languages because I tend to do a lot of real-time program; audio and haptics requires strictly deterministic behaviour in terms of timing so that a simulation can maintain perceptual coherency. So I'm quite interested in the prospects of discovering new languages that are capable of behaving well in a real-time environment.

Many tasks, especially in audio, are in fact “soft” real-time; as long as the audio buffers can be computed quickly enough, the timing doesn't have to be ultra precise. If audio vectors are coming in fast enough, they'll be played by the audio callback at the right time.

Some day I'd like to do a proper benchmark rundown of various languages when used in an audio or haptic context. However, for now I intend to use this page to collect a list of links to uses of non-C languages used in this way.

It's interesting to see that Flash has incorporated audio vector computation into its API, essentially making it possible to create sound synthesizers in Flash. http://barelyfocused.net/blog/2008/10/03/flash-vorbis-player/