[linux-audio-user] Interview with EnergyXT Developer

[Paul Davis]

On Sat, 2006-11-18 at 11:35 -0500, Ivica Ico Bukvic wrote:
> So, if I understand this correctly, there is no API out there that simply
> translates common GUI VST calls into any of the libre toolkits which are
> also available on Linux, other than the full-fledged Wine implementation? If
> so, that *really* sucks.

as i have mentioned, VSTGUI does come with a Motif backend but i very
very much doubt that it has been kept current as VSTGUI has evolved.

> It would be interesting to see just how many different drawing API calls
> most of the VSTs utilize for their GUI (since it is predominantly 2D
> drawing, my guess is there should not be that many, unless some dev goes all
> out and does DirectX eye candy/graphs/envelope
> editors/oscilloscopes/whatever). If we could produce a lib that can
> translate those API calls into FLTK or some other totally free toolkit, 

VSTGUI is LGPL'ed and on sourceforge. 

that is, of course, very very different from "having functional support
on a large number of platforms including Linux or X Window"

nothing more is needed than programmers with time and motivation.

but this is also missing a deeper issue. a lot of plugins do not use
VSTGUI, a lot of plugins make calls to win32 function that are not
necessarily GUI related. thus, even if you had VSTGUI support for X
Window, it wouldn't necessarily be trivial to port a given plugin to
linux.

--p