libose

An implementation of OpenSoundControl in C89, and a small virtual machine whose entire state is a valid OSC bundle.

It allocates nothing. You hand it a block of memory and it works inside that block, which is what makes it usable on a microcontroller, inside an audio callback, or anywhere else allocation is unavailable or forbidden.

char bytes[65536];
ose_bundle bundle = ose_newBundleFromCBytes(sizeof(bytes), bytes);
ose_pushMessage(bundle, "/hello", strlen("/hello"),
                1, OSETT_STRING, "world!");

Why the VM

The interesting part is not the OSC encoder. It is that the machine’s whole state — stack, environment, control, dump — is itself an OSC bundle. A program is therefore data, and data can be sent somewhere else and run there. A workstation can build a program and hand it to a device that has a VM and no parser.

Building

make                    # -> build/default/libose.a
make BUILD_ID=myhost    # -> build/myhost/libose.a
make check-build        # prove a header change reaches every object
make doc                # doxygen -> doc/doxygen/html

Output is written to build/$(BUILD_ID)/ rather than beside the source, because libose is meant to be vendored and every host that embeds it builds it with different options — different VM sizes, different types, different hooks. One source tree can carry every host’s artifacts at once. A .flags stamp in each build directory records the configuration, so changing a -D rebuilds instead of quietly mixing incompatible objects into one archive.

If you embed it, pass BUILD_ID and read the archive back from $(LIBOSEDIR)/build/$(BUILD_ID)/libose.a.

Testing

make -C test/ose_test check

Twelve suites. The harness builds its expected values with preprocessor macros rather than with the library, so a bug in libose cannot make a test agree with it.

ut_ose_preconditions is built deliberately without OSE_CONF_DEBUG: it asks what the library does when a precondition is violated and there is no assert to catch it, which is the configuration that ships.

Dependencies

None beyond the C standard library — string.h, stdio.h, stdlib.h, math.h, inttypes.h, stdarg.h. arpa/inet.h and windows.h appear only for byte-order helpers behind platform guards.

Documentation

make doc generates the API reference and a set of conceptual pages from doc/pages/. Start with:

• Embedding libose — allocation, and the overhead you must size for
• The Bundle as a Stack — the model everything else is built on
• The OSE VM — the machine, if you want more than a bundle
• Building and Configuration — the compile-time options

Where this sits

libose is the bottom of a stack. Above it: osekit (name lookup, extended types, module loading), o.se.stdlib (the C standard library bound into the VM), and o.se.osen (osen, the language people write). Hosts — a command line, a browser, Python, Max — sit on top of those.

Nothing in libose knows a host exists.

Licence

See LICENSE.