[linux-audio-dev] Writing LADSPA plugins in high level language?

Steve Harris S.W.Harris at ecs.soton.ac.uk
Wed Jun 14 17:04:12 UTC 2006


On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 04:20:42PM +0200, stefan kersten wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 02:09:33AM -0400, Lee Revell wrote:
> > How do you do realtime in an interpreted language?  How
> > can you guarantee the interpreter won't do something
> > that's not RT safe during a critical section?
> 
> by properly designing the interpreter?

You sped a lot of your time when your writing plugins shaving a few cycles
of work here and there to make things more efficient, introducing an
intepreter into the mix just makes that a lot harder.

When people think they want a VM or interpreter they often want garbage
collection, generally garbage collection is not relatime safe. There
are relatime garbage collectors, but they're not common and they're
extremly complicated.

Given that (Objective) C(++) has the best math libraries, debugging tools
and is very efficient I dont see any reason for using any other general
purpose language. Faust is another matter however.

FWIW, you can compile Matlab into C, but actually Matlab/Octave is not
that appropriate for writing plugins as it's designed and optimised for
complete matricies, not rolling buffers.

- Steve



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