[linux-audio-dev] Kylix

Jay Vaughan seclorum at mac.com
Fri May 9 13:12:01 UTC 2003


>IMHO, the question to ask is: how well does it support
>Model-View-Controller programming? if it doesn't do it well, then its
>a poor choice for anything except tiny applications (see my LAD/ZKM
>talk about "10 things you may not have thought about ..."). my
>impression is that GUI toolkits derived from the windows world do a
>fairly poor job of this, and that RAD tools make it even more
>difficult.
>--p

I see Kylix as I see Delphi: a great tool which, if used right, can 
make some truly impressive apps.  And I have to disagree with Pauls' 
assessment.

Delphi was probably the strongest RAD tool there ever was on Windows, 
bar none, and has been responsible for an awful lot of truly *good* 
Windows software, including some of the more interesting 
audio-tools-that-became-products, such as Square Circles' 
WaveSurgeon, and others (Syntrillium too, possible?).  If you're a 
Windows user, chances are you've had a lot of contact with 
Delphi-generated apps... it kicks ass for RAD.

Not to mention the *unlimited* Delphi custom-app market that exists 
because most anybody who truly *knows* Delphi(/Kylix) will tell you 
that for custom software development in the small-/medium-sized 
business sector (for which MVC is intended as a prime paradigm), 
little can top Delphi for speed of development, ease of use, and 
relatively bug-free, predictable code.  Most pro Delphi guys I ever 
worked with were *SECRETIVE* about what they could do with Delphi, 
because its too easy!

And in terms of raw language power, you could do some serious damage 
with ObjectPascal.  There is no stopping you doing system calls, or 
interesting pointer arithmetic-style algorithms with it.  I haven't 
seen anything in C that I couldn't have done in ObjectPascal, obscure 
tricks-just-coz notwithstanding. ObjectPascals' got *plenty* of 
ju-ju, if you catch my drift...

I would wager that the philosophy which has made Delphi such a 
*fantastic* RAD tool (don't discount RAD, Paul, unless you've gotten 
acquainted with Delphi) has probably spilled into the design of 
Kylix, though I do not know - I have not used Kylix, as I am myself a 
long-time C programmer, and have only dabbled in Delphi: I'm a C 
junkie.  I not only use it for work, but I write C for the fun of it. 
Which is why I'm into Linux in the first place.

At the crux of it, any discussion of tools vs. tools is completely 
arbitrary, but for DSP and performance, same rule applies here as any 
other computer language discussion: assembly is king, then C, then 
C++.

Nobody knows about Kylix and its Pascal for doing interesting audio 
applications, but go right ahead and give it a whirl and let us know, 
maybe you'll knock C++ down a peg or two!  I bet you could use it to 
make a Wave Editor pretty damn fast, anyway ...

-- 

;

Jay Vaughan
r&d>>music:technology:synthesizers - www.access-music.de/



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