Files with Extinct

OSC is a protocol designed for passing small messages over UDP. True enough, OSC should be employed using small messages, especially given that a UDP maximum payload is accepted to be 512-bytes. Moreover, when piping around data with Extinct, the size of Unix pipes can be limited to a couple kilobytes as well, so there are a lot of forces at play that keep messages small.

However, for larger messages, Extinct has a mechanism to handle bigness with ease. Since release 2018.c (9ef3464), one can pass the OSC data to a file (rather than pipe), then pass that filename as argument to Extinct. An example is as follows:

path/to/priv/bin/extinct path/to/large-file.dat

With that, one can transmutate OSC messages to ETF, messages containing oodles of data, without worry.

You can see this at work with the ‘esoteric’ sample data:

make esoteric_sample

Running that, you’ll yield an Erlang term from a few kilobytes of data which outputs {hello, world}.