Targeting Multiple Creative Coding Environments Efficiently with Modern C++

Across the musical creative coding community, a number of creative coding environments are in use that support compiled extensions via C APIs. Because these APIs are quite different, innovative extensions rarely end up diffusing through the whole community. This contributes to undesirable siloing, loss of potential musical innovation, and community fragmentation. Whilst there have been some limited prior efforts to make it easier to produce portable code, there is currently no general solution to this problem. Here we explore the potential of addressing this problem in the context of modern C++. We describe the requirements for portability between the Max, pd, and SuperCollider environments along with modern C++ constructs that can be used to fulfil these requirements. To make this concrete, we then describe two relatively mature medium-scale projects, FrameLib and FluCoMa, detailing how the codebases for these projects make use of C++ to produce portable exten sions, balancing different sets of priorities. The hope is that sharing and documenting these techniques helps to demystify the potential of modern C++ as a powerful resource for making useful and shareable computing resources benefitting the wider musical creative coding community.