Thank you so much for your detailed comment! I am mostly interested in writing professional audio code, so I am learning C++ at the moment. Also, do you think Rust is a good alternative to C++ for writing high performance code? I am thinking of learning Rust too, but I am not sure whether Rust audio programming is popular or not.
My understanding of Rust audio programming is that it is possible, but still fairly early days... something like JUCE provides a huge amount out of the box that you might not initially appreciate, e.g. it abstracts away the details of all the different plugin formats and all the different platform's audio APIs, and it has been around for long enough that you can be confident it does it well.
I'm really curious about Rust as it feels like a nicer language to work with than C++, but if you are serious about building professional audio software I personally don't think you can avoid C++ so you might as well embrace it.
I have a feeling that with Rust, you'd spend half your time figuring out how to do stuff that JUCE does out of the box, which is fine if you are interested in the figuring out part, but ultimately it might not help you focus on the actual audio programming.
Also there are a tonne of resources on C++ and especially JUCE out there, never underestimate the power of being able to Google for your answers!
Edit: on the C++ side, I found Bjarne Stroustrup's "C++ Programming Language" book quite a good way to understand the fundamentals. To be honest, I usually learn new languages just by doing and Googling, but with C++ it quickly became apparent after the 100th mystery crash that I'd actually have to understand what was going on under the hood with memory etc!
Haha yeah sorry about that ;) To be honest I actually found it really interesting to be exposed to lower level concerns like thinking about memory allocation, runtime complexity, locking etc. after working in higher level languages throughout my career, but there’s no doubt that it can be a frustrating language at times.
One thing to watch out for is that the language has evolved a lot recently, but a lot of code samples are still written in an old style. You want to make sure you are using “modern” C++ (e.g. post C++11) features where possible e.g. smart pointers. It can be a bit confusing as some JUCE classes have been superseded by the C++ standard library, they date back to the days before “modern C++”... but I wouldn’t stress too much, using the JUCE versions is usually equally fine.
Depending on what kind of audio programming you intend to do, it should be possible to use Rust or other alternative programming languages. Your mileage may vary, depending on the dependencies of what you intend to build. If you want to interface with your operating system's low-level audio libraries you should be able to do that from any language that can interface with C. I was able to use Ada together with ALSA on Linux in this way. In this case the code responsible for generating the sound was in Ada, and the code for interfacing with the audio hardware (via ALSA) was in C. If you intend to write audio code for bare metal, you should be able to use any programming language your target hardware's toolchain supports. I've heard of people using alternative languages to write VSTs. I'm not an expert in this area, however theoretically you should be able to do something similar to the above as long as you have a good way to interface with C/C++ code.
