I have a question about the “Cabbage patcher” which looks like a mini-DAW exercising Cabbage/csound code, will it be a VStudio independent application?
Regard.
Future directions for Cabbage
No, I’m afraid not. I put a lot of time and effort into that feature, but as far as I can tell it’s not used that often. Plus, most DAW offer flexible routing and patching options these days, and are probably doing it better than I did!
I just want to express my enthusiasm for this new direction. Everything you’re proposing feels like a move towards modernizing cabbage and making it more compatible with current tools and tech.
As for custom widgets using html, js and css, I think that’s going to create a lot of potential for some really cool projects. How a tool sounds is one thing, but I’m really interested in the way UX affects how we use those tools, and how that affects our creative output. This will allow for easier, faster experimentation in that domain.
And +1 for moving to JSON for the Cabbage section. I would propose taking a look at json5 as an option. It’s an extension of JSON that is a bit less strict. It allows for things like comments (very handy for complicated UI stuff), single quoted strings, unquoted object keys, extra whitespace, etc. while still being compatible with regular JSON.
And if we could have the JSON in a separate file, we could easily run a code formatter like Prettier to keep things tidy. Food for thought…
exciting stuff!
Yeah JSON5 would be nice. But the biggest issue for me is support on the C++ side. I’m currently using nlohmann::json which is the gold standard for JSON in C++, I am on the lookout for a comparable framework for JSON5 but they just don’t exist yet.
I agree. A friend of mine who has worked in the audio programming industry for many years always jokes that 90% of of what we hear in a new plugin is through our eyes. 
I meant to comment on this earlier. It’s already implemented.
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ah yeah, hadn’t considered that! Well, seeing as it’ll be in its own file, I think it should be fairly straightforward to setup a task and a watcher in VS Code to just auto-compile from json5 (or yaml/toml for that matter) to JSON.
Yeah, something like that might work but the plugins have nothing to do with VS Code when they are run. So the JSON5 would need to be converted to JSON on export. But it would be interesting to support other interchange formats.