Mélodium

Mélodium is a dataflow-oriented language, focusing on treatments applied on data, allowing high scalability and massive parallelization safely.

Introduction

Mélodium is a tool and language for manipulation of large amount of data, using the definition of treatments that applies on data through connections, with a track approach that makes any script higly scalable and implicitly parallelizable.

For more exhaustive explanations, please refer to the Mélodium Language book.

Mélodium is under development and continously being defined and improved. Released documentation is available on docs.rs and standard reference on melodium.tech. Development documentation is available at https://melodium.gitlab.io/melodium/melodium/, and the standard reference at https://melodium.gitlab.io/melodium/reference/.

Download & installation

Mélodium releases can be downloaded for multiple platforms from the Mélodium Repository.

Command-line usage

Launch a Mélodium file:

melodium <FILE>
melodium run <FILE>

Launch a Mélodium file with a different main entry than Main:

melodium run --main OtherEntry <FILE>

Check a Mélodium file:

melodium check <FILE>

Compile and package a script project into a jeu file:

melodium package <SCRIPT> <FILE>

Draw sequences as SVG:

melodium draw <FILE> [ENTRY …] <OUTPUT>

Generate documentation:

melodium doc <FILE> <OUTPUT>

Example

The following code makes a copy of the file ./input.txt to ./output.txt. More examples are available under examples.

use std/fs/mono/read::ReadPath
use std/fs/mono/write::WritePath
use std/process/engine::Ready

sequence Main()
{
    Ready()
    ReadPath(path="input.txt")
    WritePath(path="output.txt")
    
    Ready.ready -> ReadPath.trigger,data -> WritePath.data
}

Compilation

Linux prerequisites

On Linux systems, ALSA development files are required, provided through libasound2-dev on Debian-like systems and alsa-lib-devel on Fedora-like ones.

Compile from source

Mélodium is fully written in Rust, and just need usual cargo build and cargo test.

git clone https://gitlab.com/melodium/melodium.git
cd melodium
cargo build

Install from crates.io

Mélodium can also be directly installed from crates.io.

cargo install melodium

Cross-compilation

A more detailed explanation on how to cross-compile Mélodium is written in dedicated file.

Standard library

Mélodium comes with its standard library. If needed, the default standard library can be overrided using the MELODIUM_STDLIB environment variable, or by passing explicily the option --stdlib <PATH> to the command line.

If compiled from source, standard library can be found in the std/ folder. If installed through crates.io, it should be found within ~/.cargo/registry/src/<cargo git reference>/melodium-<version>/std.

Development

Development channels and related Mélodium stuff are available on Discord.

Origin

Mélodium were first developed during research in signal analysis and musical information retrieval, in need of a tool to manage large amount of records and easily write experimentations, without being concerned of underlying technical operations. It has been presented in this thesis (in French).

The first implementation was in C++ and ran well on high performance computers, such as those of Compute Canada. That tool appeared to be really useful, and the concepts used within its configuration language to deserve more attention. This first experimental design is still available at https://gitlab.com/qvignaud/Melodium.

The current project is the continuation of that work, rewritten from ground in Rust, and redesigned with a general approach of massively multithreaded data flows in mind.

Licence

This software is free and open-source, under the EUPL licence.

Why this one specifically? Well, as this project have a particular relationship with cultural world, probably more than most other softwares, it is important to have a strong legal basis covering also the notion of artwork. In the same way, as no culture is more important than another, it was important to have a licence readable and understanble by most of people. The EUPL is available and legally valid in 23 languages, covering a large number of people.

Then, the legal part:

Licensed under the EUPL, Version 1.2 or - as soon they will be approved by the European Commission - subsequent versions of the EUPL (the "Licence"); You may not use this work except in compliance with the Licence. You may obtain a copy of the Licence at: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/page/eupl

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the Licence is distributed on an "AS IS" basis, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the Licence for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the Licence.

And do not worry, this licence is explicitly compatible with the ones mentionned in its appendix, including most of the common open-source licences.