Anukari 1.0 is out. Reflections on three years of full-time work, from leaving Google and a broken shoulder to first sound and full polyphony.
Evan Mezeske
Jun 2026
With Apple's help I cut Metal kernel launch overhead under 50us using MTLSharedEvent and double-buffered encoding, then had to unbreak CUDA.
May 2025
Applying Apple's NDA guidance to the GPU spin loop, serializing its kernels with MTLEvent, and deduplicating it across processes via shared memory.
My Appeal to Apple post worked. I got a call with a Metal engineer, performance hints I can use now, and an open line to the right people at Apple.
An undocumented Metal error 14 with multiple plugin instances traced to kernels clearing 300 MB delay buffers that a low-watermark check made unnecessary.
Feb 2025
GarageBand silently stops calling ProcessBlock, so Anukari now detects the auto-bypass and hands the physics simulation to a background thread.
MacOS won't up-clock the GPU for latency-sensitive audio, so Anukari now burns one warp on useless spin work. Latency dropped about 40 percent.
Nov 2024
The new renderer runs on macOS via Metal and an NSView overlay, with OpenGL fully removed. The macOS audio performance mystery remains unsolved.
Sep 2024
On macOS the 3D graphics interfere with GPU audio even when nothing is drawn, so I'm starting the Filament port to rule out Apple's OpenGL.
The OpenCL kernel now compiles and runs under Metal via macros and passes the golden tests, though the rough port still leaks memory everywhere.
Split the simulator into a shared base with OpenCL and Metal children. Macros may let the same kernel source compile for OpenCL, Metal, and CUDA.
The GPU copy optimization landed well, and NVIDIA on Windows runs big presets fine, but MacOS OpenCL stays mysteriously memory-bound. Metal port is next.
Aug 2024
Windows and MacOS installers finally work on other people's machines, after switching back to Apple Clang and a vcpkg triplet targeting MacOS 11.
Windows pre-alpha is solid, so now I'm chasing MacOS bugs like file chooser corruption, plus a pkg installer since a dmg can't place VST3 and AU files.
The Audio Units logo and the Audio Units symbol are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.
VST is a trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH, registered in Europe and other countries.
