Moritz Laass

About Me

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.

Sessions

  • Compiling Music

    NKIDO A Live-Coding Audio Languge with a Zero-Allocation C++20 Bytecode VM
    10:30 - 10:50 UTC | Monday 9th November 2026 | Bristol 2
    Intermediate
    Advanced

    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. […]