7 Apr
2006
7 Apr
'06
11:23 p.m.
On Fri, 2006-04-07 at 14:23 -0800, Patrick Stinson wrote:
As an added note to my previous comments, I really
like the app
interface that mpd uses. Writing ascii events using some spec or
another to a file descriptor (socket in mpd's case) seems to be a
terrific way to communicated with apps and libs. I run the svn
pksampler like this:
pksampler | pkaudiod
I could just as easily have either use a socket or some other pipe,
and this is easy to debug, script, profile, etc. On the client and
server sides, I wrap my 10-minute rpc into an interface with generic
calls. Everything having to do with input (MIDI, OSC, whatever)
happens in the app code. The interface functions resemble those of
FMODEx's interface; add sample, connect to channel, set sample attrs,
etc.
As an interface designer, the first thing I look for on an engine's
project site is some sort of asynchronous API - I should never concern
myself with anything outside referencing the api from my app's one
windowing thread. FMOD, gstreamer, and my dead pkaudio project do this
very well. I don't ever want to worry about what thread it happens in,
what threads it will affect, or what the performance effects of
*making* the call will be (as opposed to residual effects).
although i agree that this is the right design for many classes of
application design, i would like to see how you propose to tackle
metering and waveform display (the two most difficult examples).
ardour would be relatively easy to separate into interface+engine
processes (as opposed to just a lib/lib-client separation) if it were
not for these issues. moving waveform and metering data back and forth
between two processes via a wire protocol is very expensive and
inefficient.
--p