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

[Phil Frost]

On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 10:48:54AM -0400, Paul Winkler wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 09:59:48AM -0400, Steve wrote:
> > One thing I just learned about recently is Pyrex. It doesn't generate
> > stand-alone programs but is meant for creating libraries that can be
> > called from Python -- it generates C code from a Python-like language,
> > which is structured to be called from Python.  This makes sense to
> > me... why worry about supported the millions of CPU architectures out
> > there when this is already taken care of by GCC.  So instead of
> > generating ML, generate "portable ML" (i.e., C code), and let GCC take
> > care of the platform-specific work.  I think this is a great idea,
> > except that I'd like to just write a whole program or plugin in it
> > instead of making something that is meant to co-exist with Python
> > "glue code".
> 
> Pyrex is good for making faster python libraries, which is a great
> thing, but it won't help with the problem that you really
> don't want to be running a python interpreter inside a realtime
> dsp system.

That's not entirely true. I once wrote an OS where the filesystem and
ATA drivers were written in Python, which was accomplished by linking
the kernel with libpython (no joke). Lower levels, like the memory
manager, were written in Pyrex. In the end it was pretty slow and
useless, but it did run, and at one point I managed to get on IRC with
it :)

Pyrex is pretty much Python + C, only the C syntax is changed to look
more like Python. If you use only C types, then the code output by Pyrex
will not depend on Python (except some of the module metadata it
generates, but the generated functions can be executed without it). The
problem though is that it's just C with a different syntax.

Re. lack of interest in developing new compiled languages, see Wirth's
law: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law>. The good news is that
in a few years, computers will be so damn fast that using Python to
write audio plugins won't be so bad. Of course when that happens, we
will have some fancy new language which is even slower, and manages to
consume enough resources that it will seem as if computers are not in
fact getting faster. You might as well just expect using a 20-year old
language for all your audio work forever.