[LAD] Programming LV2 plugin from scratch tutorial video series

David Robillard d at drobilla.net
Thu Oct 21 18:23:41 CEST 2021


On Wed, 2021-10-20 at 22:32 +0200, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 10:26:41AM -0400, David Robillard wrote:
>  
> > > That C isn't trying to describe the entire world.
> > 
> > This is a glaring straw man.  I'm not sure what you're arguing
> > against,
> > but it certainly isn't LV2.
> 
> No, it isn't. Sorry if I gave that impression. It's more likely what
> you refer to writing
> 
> > and the W3C and much of the semantic web community deserves a ton
> > of criticism

Fair enough, to be clear I just mean that in the context of LV2. 
Slightly more generally, also the context of most people/projects
actually using some of this tech in the real world.

The things you quite righly point out as silly pipe-dreams come from a
particular academic niche of quasi-logicians who are completely
divorced from real-world software development (and it shows).  Even
there, the argument that it's important to somehow describe the
universe is frankly pretty straw-manney (though I'm sure you can find
somebody in an armchair somewhere who thinks that), but regardless,
nobody really cares what that camp says at this point anyway.  Even in
the linked data world.

The more data-oriented people had good ideas that are useful in
practice and have literally nothing to do with semantics.  We need some
of that - mainly that whole extensibility thing.

I suspect that people imagine this is much more theoretical than it is.
This is how development of LV2 things happens in reality.  If you need
stuff, you can add stuff.  If people agree that the added stuff is
sane/useful, then perhaps it gets standardized.  There is no Steinberg
here to tell you what you're allowed to do.  This is why little ideas
like "IDs must be globally unique and can not clash" are so important.
It's why *you* get to invent them if you like, and you don't need
approval from me or anyone else to do so. 

Perhaps it's a bit messy, but that's how worse-is-better works.  I'll
take a working spec that's a bit messy over GMPI or whatever any day. 
/That/ tack is the pipe-dream, just a very different sort of one.

It's all very addressable, but as always, the real reason for things
still being pretty messy is as crass as it is simple: nobody's paying
anyone to make a really nice open source audio plugin specification. 
The freedom to pile in whatever you want, at the cost of things being a
bit chaotic and unpolished, is just the best we can do in these
circumstances.  At least it works.

-- 
dr


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