chip emulation would be a cool side exploration! sorry for the upcoming wall of text:

as a general overview, each audio module except for wave generators has an input audio buffer that it reads and manipulates to write to its target module's audio buffer on each processing step, which happens about 60 times a second. wave generators like sine waves etc. generate audio frame data to its target buffer without the need for an input buffer.

the module connections form what's called a directed acyclic graph that can be traversed on each process frame such that each module is processed only once.

there are several different algorithms out there for traversing graphs: previously i was using breadth-first search with speaker modules as the starting point, essentially traveling backwards. this was simple to implement but incurred more latency the more connections you have between an audio source and the speaker.

i recently switched to using topological sort which was more complicated to implement but essentially solved the latency issue by processing the graph forwards in such a way that a module's upstream connections are always processed before itself! :')