Expanding the Faust ecosystem

The Faust project continues to grow through a open-source ecosystem of developers, researchers, artists, and teachers. This repository serves as a collaborative hub for initiatives that expand the reach, capabilities, and accessibility of Faust by proposing different research and development topics.

Overview

Faust is not only a language for real-time signal processing. Is is also a platform that bridges research, education, and production across many domains: web audio, embedded systems, sound synthesis, interactive installations, and machine learning for instance.

To keep the ecosystem evolving, GRAME and the wider Faust community regularly propose, mentor, and support open-source development projects through initiatives such as Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the Faust Ideas List.

Google Summer of Code

Faust has been an active participant in Google Summer of Code since 2022. Each year, new contributors join to implement ambitious projects that consolidate the Faust ecosystem—creating new tools, backends, integrations, and educational resources.

Examples of recent GSoC work include:

• Integration of automatic differentiation for Differentiable DSP (DDSP) in Faust.
• Development of Faust Package Manager for managing DSP libraries.
• Integrations of Faust into platforms such as Cables.gl, Godot and Wwise.
• New tools such as faust2clap and faust2wwise.
• A VS Code Language Server and Formatter for improved developer experience.

These projects are documented in detail in GSOC.md, which includes descriptions, expected outcomes, required skills, and mentoring contacts. Each contribution strengthens the foundation of Faust and helps make high-level audio programming more accessible and powerful.

The Ideas List

The IDEAS.md document gathers ongoing and future ideas for extending the Faust ecosystem. It functions as a living roadmap for experimental features, integrations, and research directions. Many of these ideas can become GSoC projects or independent community initiatives.

Some current and past highlights include:

• New deployment models such as Progressive Web Apps and NPM-packaged web components.
• Advanced DSP features like invertible functions, hot-reloadable soundfiles, and PFFT-like wrappers.
• Improved developer tools, including better linear algebra support, UI declarations, and faust2nihplug for Rust.
• Creative projects such as modal reverb modeling, modular synthesis, and AI/LLM-based integrations.

Get Involved

If you have an idea, a prototype, or a research interest that could extend Faust—contribute!

You can:

• Browse existing ideas in IDEAS.md.
• Propose a new project or join an existing one.
• Participate in our Discord community.
• Apply to GSoC when open, or collaborate year-round on open issues.