I wrote a little library! The purpose of this post is to advertise its existence.
zOSC is an MIT-licensed, Zig-powered implementation of the “Open Sound Control” (OSC) data format. OSC is a simple message format, similar to JSON or XML. The informal 1.1 specification sketches out the beginnings of a distinction between OSC as a content format and its most common use as a form of RPC (remote procedure call) between sound-aligned digital communicators.
I needed an MIT-compatible implementation of the OSC RPC for use in seamstress version 2.0.0. Seamstress versions 1.x are licensed under the GPL, but versions 2.x will be MIT. (It’s not really my aim to become rich off of seamstress, but I’ll flag that the license may change again in the future.) The main OSC implementation that I’m aware of, liblo is LGPL. While that’s not incompatible for use in an MIT project, I’d like seamstress 2.x to be usable in, e.g. closed-source or commercial projects, for which an LGPL dependency becomes mildly annoying.
As it turns out, the OSC specification is a good deal easier to implement than I had initially imagined. I found even attempting the implementation to be an extremely clarifying use of my energy; for instance turning OSC messages from black boxes to chunks of data that I understand completely. It’s eminently possible to process and create OSC messages with (nearly) zero allocations, and this Zig implementation supports that use case beautifully (although creation of messages requires a careful use of the Zig standard library’s FixedBufferAllocator).
It also is much clearer to me when and how best to reuse OSC message objects; for example zOSC has a convenient Message.Builder type which can be used to store message data in an editable fashion which can then be commit()-ed one or more times to create messages to send.
If your project is in Zig or can link against a C library, you can use zOSC. Head over to the repository. You can either download the source and build it using version 0.13 of the Zig compiler, or if you’re interested only in the C library, you can check the Releases for a .zip file for your target. A pkg-config file is provided for smoothing out compilation. If your project is in Zig, of course, you can access it by pointing the Zig package manager at the repository; more detailed instructions are in the README of the repository.
Yes! If you use zOSC in your projects, I’d love feedback and welcome contributions on documentation, the API, etc. Feel free to open an issue, a pull request, or send me an email.