Compiling Music
NKIDO A Live-Coding Audio Languge with a Zero-Allocation C++20 Bytecode VM
NKIDO is an open-source live-coding environment for audio synthesis. Its language, Akkado, combines Tidal/Strudel-style mini-notation with a modular, DAG-based signal flow. It compiles to Cedar, a zero-allocation C++20 bytecode VM with 95+ DSP opcodes designed to be embedded anywhere, from browser AudioWorklets via WebAssembly to native applications. The entire stack is MIT-licensed.
A previous talk introduced the system. This one is a deeper, year-on cut: the language has grown a type system, the compiler resolves overloaded builtins, and, most importantly for anyone shipping real-time C++, the engine now carries a memory-integrity harness that catches the failures unit tests never see.
On the language side, we'll explore why signal flow is written as explicit left-to-right pipes rather than SuperCollider's message-passing or Tidal's Haskell-embedded approach, how the mini-notation parser handles Euclidean rhythms and polyrhythm natively inside ordinary pattern strings, and how a deliberately permissive type system *coerces rather than rejects*, because punishing a live-coder mid-performance with a hard type error is the wrong default. On the runtime side, we'll walk through how the engine stays glitch-free while you edit code that's already playing, and what it takes to run it inside the browser's audio thread.
The whole system was built largely through AI-assisted "vibe coding." That raises an obvious question for an audience that ships real-time audio: can you trust it? The honest answer is the test infrastructure, so we'll look at a four-legged harness that guards against unbounded growth, leaks, audio-path allocations, and slow drift across recompiles, and why those four are the failure modes a passing unit suite happily hides.
The talk opens with an extended live demo building a piece from scratch in the browser, and ends with an autonomous research loop that improves the engine's DSP performance on its own, while the verification harness guarantees every generated change stays correct.
Moritz Laass
Moritz Laass is a software engineer and designer based in Germany, with a BA in Industrial Design and an MSc in Human-Computer Interaction. He's been programming for 25+ years and shipping software professionally for 15, across full-stack web, mobile, microcontrollers and IoT, games, and installations. He's been making music in DAWs for nearly 20 years. NKIDO is his solo side project, built almost entirely with AI coding assistants, combining long-standing interests in audio, programming languages, and real-time systems.