[LAD] Specification issues in open systems

Chris Cannam cannam at all-day-breakfast.com
Mon Sep 29 09:48:49 UTC 2008


On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 6:18 PM, Chris Williams <yikyak at gmail.com> wrote:
> DSSI, IMO, *attempted* to get this right. Implicit in the
> DSSI spec is an acknowledgment that a plugin spec can't be
> in the business of mandating gui solutions on a platform
> with many to choose from, so they tried to find a way
> around it using a remote gui which communicates with the
> host via OSC. I'm not sure this is entirely correct,
> either, but it's at least "more right" than several other
> ways of doing it (*cough* LV2), especially the central idea
> of trying to abstract the gui away from the architecture.

The DSSI approach has two really big problems:

 1.  It's hard to share significant amounts of data between GUI and
plugin, and to do things like synchronising the state of user presets.
 It can be done using shared memory negotiated between GUI and plugin
via configure calls, for example, and Lars wrote a small library to
help with this, but it's always going to be a pain.

 2. It's different from any other plugin system, so you can't just
write the code once and wrapper it for each of your supported
protocols.  Take a look at the absolutely gross hack used by dssi-vst,
for example, to see how much pain is involved in doing an incomplete
and unsatisfactory job of wrapping a GUI written for another system.


Chris



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