[linux-audio-dev] LV2 library API

[Dave Robillard]

On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 22:27 +0200, fons adriaensen wrote:
> On Tue, May 30, 2006 at 03:10:38PM -0400, Dave Robillard wrote:
> 
> > > I'd consider any interface that just returns a constant and requires
> > > a malloc() and a free() to do it plain broken. This data doesn't live
> > > in kernel space, or does it ? You could just return a const char *.
> > 
> > It's not a constant.
> 
> Oh, I didn't know know port types could change dynamically.

Well, they can't, but the actual port type values in the data file
aren't fixed in any way - there can be any URI (string) there.

The function we're talking about pulls this info directly from the data
file (not eg from a loaded Port object which would have a const type
string).  The library doesn't load all the stuff from the file into
memory (in which case the port type would be const), it just queries the
data file every time you ask for something (I won't attempt to enforce
my guess about what a host would want to cache in memory, that's the
hosts' decision).

(Rationale being that an LV2 host can run an LV2 plugin keeping only the
actual DLL in memory (eg consuming far less memory than an equivalent
LADSPA plug), rather than having a bunch of data sitting around that may
not be useful)

-DR-