[LAD] Communicating between python UI and C++ engine for real time audio?

[David Robillard]

On Thu, 2011-11-03 at 09:39 -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 9:22 AM, Harry van Haaren <harryhaaren at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 5:09 PM, Iain Duncan <iainduncanlists at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> I'm hoping to arrive at some sort of design that ultimately lets the
> >> engine act as an audio server with multiple user interface clients, possibly
> >> not even on the same machines
> >
> > Did you concider using OSC as an "abstraction layer" between your GUI &
> > Engine? Spares quite a lot of nasty shared-mem tricks, and RCU, well.. is
> > suppose you could have the editing commands sent to engine, or else run the
> > algo on the GUI side, and update the sequence in the engine.
> 
> no, using a protocol like OSC doesn't solve the basic problem: making
> changes to data structures used by the RT code when those changes
> can't be done with RT constraints (e.g. memory allocation). you still
> need some code that runs outside RT constraints to modify the data
> before giving the new version to the RT code to use.

True, though it's a good idea regardless if it's feasible.  If you're
going to go cross-language anyway, you might as well put a real protocol
in-between so you gain the advantage of being able to do separate
processes/machines as well.

IMO sending "commands" between UI and engine is the best architecture
for things like this anyway, which lends itself easily to using an
actual protocol.

-dr