What's the general status of Reaktor?
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Reading the tea leaves, potentially the issue is that the core developer/founder who was the driving force behind Reaktor is no longer active on a daily basis at NI and has moved on to other projects. So until a replacement for his genius can be found… Reaktor may be left behind. Which is too bad really. It’s such a powerhouse
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I guess the question is, is this person still at NI, and are they working on porting all that stuff?
It should be noted, however, that NI publicly committed to port their existing product portfolio, which obviously includes Reaktor. So while I’m hopeful that it will happen eventually, I’ll believe it when I see it. I guess the problem isn’t only the porting itself, which seems to be a herculean task in its own right, but making sure that it’s fully backwards compatible as well — a new Reaktor version without the UL wouldn’t make much sense and would be a death blow to the platform, imo. I sure wish NI would keep us updated on how it’s going on a regular basis.
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I believe most (all) original engineers have left the building. Some of them were freelancing for NI too. So I guess current engineering efforts are challenging as it's always very hard to inherit other people's code and improve this, assuming the code bases was started from small projects with limited documentation and test-frameworks.
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I'm going out on a limb and assume ED was talking about Vadim Zavalishin, who appears to be working for NI still https://de.linkedin.com/in/vadim-zavalishin-451bb812b But I'm not sure, and more information would be greatly appreciated.
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It depends... If the code is well written, program has good structure, it may take some time to get in, but not that hard work....
Also, it is often possible to consult/ask previous programmer. Mainly if it was one/few man project. Programs are like babies... And programmers like parents.... One does not loose the attachement to his work even if working on different project in different company....
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I would like to chime in with just a personal remark that I would appreciate a bit of a roadmap for Reaktor here in the forum. Nothing detailed - just a general heads up
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Stephan Schmitt is the NI co-founder and original designer of Reaktor. He’s moved on to another project - although his new company did develop Kontour as a contractor to NI.
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He left NI 10 years ago, or so.... Lots of time for NI to adapt. And as Reaktor is his child I do not believe he wouldn't want to help to some extent (if needed) to live it as long as possible.....
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Yeah I meant Vadim, and he's still with NI. There's a few other long-standing developers still with NI, like Georg Haupt for example.
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This is a bit off-topic :-) But the internal mode of thinking for LLVM is "static single assignment," which is fundamentally a data flow concept. Thus, data flow actually translates very easily to LLVM-speak, and the reason there's so much talk about control flow, is that that's what needs a little more effort to translate! (See also: "phi operator".)
Agreed that the name "LLVM" is, ..., "mainly of historical significance."
Regarding "who is still at NI," I noted with some dismay that NI now has a main owner that's a private equity firm. What private equity firm generally are very good at, is mining out all the market value that exists in a given set of products, while investing very little in costly and/or risky R&D. What we could fear for the future if these owners follow the general trend would be lots of marketing, lots of re-skinning, and not much innovation.
Hence ... some concern about the future of Reaktor. Especially given that the list was updated on March 14, 2022, and still doesn't mention Reaktor at all. (I tried to post a link, but I get a "site security check" red box. It's the page you get when you google "native instruments Apple-Silicon-M1-Compatibility-News")
A message on the page saying "Reaktor will eventually be supported" would be a reasonable expectaction, but given that that message is not there, I think the only reasonable conclusion is that Native Instruments has not committed to supporting Reaktor on M1 silicon. It's been 18 months since first release, and longer for developers who have been on Apple insider seeding programs.
"it's not officially supported" and "not coming very soon" as posted by @Matt_NI are also not sending messages of particular reassurance, so the right choice here is likely to wean myself off of the Reaktor plugins. (And/or develop my own competitor tool and take over the market. Hah! :-D)
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This is a bit off-topic :-) But the internal mode of thinking for LLVM is "static single assignment," which is fundamentally a data flow concept. Thus, data flow actually translates very easily to LLVM-speak, and the reason there's so much talk about control flow, is that that's what needs a little more effort to translate!
From the little I've read, I got that LLVM uses a Data Flow based implementation to analysing/model Control Flow code. It doesn't necessarily follow that this means it is automatically good at analysing Dataflow code though. An analysis engine that is designed/evolved to analyse control flow will be good at analysing control flow.
If the logic was sound that analysing some particular paradigm is easy using that paradigm, then LLVM would use control flow to analyse control flow - obviously not the case
I'll ask again for examples of LLVM being used as part of the compiler toolchain for Dataflow languages.
As far as the ownership of NI vs future of Reaktor, iirc concerns have been raised before, but generally the response is that development continues, and that it is against forum rules to stir up negative discussion about NI and about Reaktor. There have been warnings handed out for this in the past ;)
fwiw, normally, I would suggest if you're going to wean yourself off something it should be Apple ;). But in this particular case, I grudgingly think they've done us all a favour long term. Hopefully we'll see PC manufacturers moving over to high end ARM based platforms too. I just wish Apple could have found a better way to manage the transition.
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Hopefully we'll see PC manufacturers moving over to high end ARM based platforms too.
Why should they do it? x86 platform has stronger CPUs than ARMs. And it has also comparable CPU power/energy ratio like ARMs (if they are made on the same process).
Apple did good job on ARM platform, but still far behind top x86 CPUs. And x86 is developing fast past five years. And is going to develop fast for at least four, five years.
We will see what M2 brings, but it looks like just a small step adding 15-20% CPU power and no more cores.... AMD adds 25-30% and adds cores. So the difference between ARM and x86 becomes bigger and not lower...
Time will tell if AS will be competetive to x86 or will be lagging behind. ARM is going to fire 15% of people...
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That's strange - I just checked out a comparison between apple M1 and Ryzen 9 5900
The complete apple system is a similar price to the AMD cpu... and yet, for single core tasks - like Reaktor - the M1 beats the Ryzen on some benchmarks. It's only in benchmarks that stress multi-core processing where the AMD clearly wins.
It's an interesting assessment anyway, comparing the 1st generation entry level AS with high end extremely mature tech that only wins on some benchmarks and costs way more, and calling it 'far behind'?
To me the fact that a 1st gen low end entry level AS soc can outperform a top of the range AMD monster in single core processing demonstrates how far ahead Apple are, not how far behind. And I'm no Apple lover - can't stand their 'ecosystem', their shady customer support, bad styling, forced obsolescence, unrepairables, fanboy army... just doesn't work for me, but I'm not a fantasist, they have got this right - if the PC industry doesn't do something quick, they will lose a lot of market share. Particularly at a time when a lot of middle income customers throughout the world are getting poorer not richer. The idea of a system where the cpu is north of $500, and graphics card likely more, before you've even considered mobo, RAM, etc. is out of reach to many folk.
Can you buy an off the shelf PC for the same price as Apple M1 system that has similar performance?
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Reaktor runs on M1? ;-)
If you compare in singlecore, you may compare the bottom level CPU by AMD and not the top one.... They have more or less comparable singlecore....
M1 core has double or triple more elements than Zen3 core, so no wonder it is a bit faster. On contrary, it is sort of embarasing it is not much faster.... But because of that M1 may not have so many cores... So it looses in multithread.... The tradeoff between strong, but big core, and less strong, but smaller has to be weighted. Apple has strategy few strong ones and some weak ones. AMD uses the same pretty strong cores, but not so big.
And Ryzen 9 is not top level AMD CPU, it is top level Ryzen. There are also Threadrippers and Epycs....
Can you buy an off the shelf PC for the same price as Apple M1 system that has similar performance?
You may buy way better PC for that price. I have ASRock Deskmini X300, with Ryzen 7 5700G, 2x1 TB SSD, 64 GB RAM. And it cost me around 1 000 EUR. It would cost less now. I built it myself, but one may buy it assembled of shelf.
Also, I have suspicion that basic M1 models are sold with zerro margin or even negative. Just to attract new users and sell people the story about great processor. Soon they find, they need more memory and so on, and next time will pay double, triple for not so downsized models......
M1 is OK CPU. I admit it is sort of success ARM may compete with x86. But M1 is not miracle that beats everything, like Apple sells it. Apple mostly compares M1 with Intels, or even several years old Intels.... So tells very biased story, almost lie. It is fact manipulation par excellence....
M1 is weaker (in multicore) than more or less 'toy' AMD APU 5700G. So, no miraculous threadripper.... Just another medium performance CPU.
Zen 4 will hit the road in four months, or so. It might be faster than comming M2 even in single thread. Or at least comparable. Not speaking about multithread....
And x86 platform now also more focuses on energy efficiency. It is good AS is here. The more competition, the better. But as I see it Apple will have hard times to be competetive to x86. Do not be fooled by the several years period when AMD was on the edge of bancrupcy and Intel had his "4 cores must do" and x86 progress was rather slow. There was no real competition....
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Sorry to interrupt the technical discussion, but is Reaktor working ok on a M1 chip using Rosetta ? And on Monterey ?
Is any of you using it regulary with Rosetta and could share some real life infos ? I did read the whole thread but couldn't find any evidence Reaktor is at least running on M1 with Rosetta... I hope it is...
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