Velato is a music-based programming language that accepts a MIDI file as input. This is my hello world.

The compiler is written in C# and I couldn't find a recent pre-compiled binary, so I needed a way to compile it myself. I developed this on macOS, so I used Mono from Homebrew:

brew install mono

Mono ships with the msbuild program, which we can use to compile the Velato compiler:

msbuild Rottytooth.Esolang.Velato/Rottytooth.Esolang.Velato.csproj /p:Configuration=Release

This will put the compiled output in the Rottytooth.Esolang.Velato/bin/Release directory. The Velato.exe and NAudio.dll files are what we're interested in. They have been copied into the vendor directory of this repo for convenience.

Since Velato takes MIDI as its input, I needed a way to produce a MIDI file. LilyPond is a "music engraving program" whose focus is producing high quality sheet music, but will also output MIDI.

Note: I used LilyPond version 2.19.x for this, which is currently pre-release. There is a Homebrew package, via casks, that is 2.18.x, which doesn't produce a midi that Velato accepts.

The general flow is:

1. lilypond hello-world.ly
2. mono vendor/Velato.exe hello-world.midi
3. mono hello-world.mid.exe

The included build script is a convenience for steps 1 & 2.