On Sat, Dec 9, 2017 at 6:36 AM, Fons Adriaensen <fons@linuxaudio.org> wrote:

Interesting that you mention carla. I wanted to give it a try some
months ago. Until I noticed the list of dependencies, see e.g.
<https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/carla/>.

This 'Audio Plugin Host' depends on at least five GUI toolkits
(ntk, gtk2, gtk3, qt4, qt5), a number of soft synths (why ?),
and some very specific or -git versions of lots of libraries.
Many of these have similar long dependency lists of their own.

As a plugin host, Carla attempts (and generally does) allow plugins to use many different toolkits for their own GUIs. To do that, it has to have small amounts of "stub" code that connect it to each possible toolkit.

This list of dependencies mostly just reflects that, rather than anything to do with Carla's own implementation.