8 Feb
2003
8 Feb
'03
12:24 a.m.
I'm
questioning whether
having a simpler query based system may be easier. I don't like the idea
that you have to instantiate to query, though.
Many plug-in standards require instanciation before fetching
properties. PTAF must be able to make good wrappers for existing
plug-ins, industry requires it. Anyway I would like to minimize the number of
functions.
Functions are handy when the calling conventions
of both parts are compatible. If the language you use
doesn't support this convention natively, all functions
have to be wrapped, which is a real pain.
If you have to wrap into different languages, you have to wrap enums, too.
There is no way to reduce the total number of things wrapped.
More, there are still issues with existing plug-ins,
reporting
wrongly if they support some opcode or not (talk to this issue
to Plogue people :).
Bugs are bugs, whether they are a NULL pointer or a false-positive.
How about
defining buffer alignment as "what works good for whatever
extensions that are available on this hardware"...?
Good, but it requires the host to be updated when new hardware
is released. We can add a host property indicating the current
alignment so the plug-in can check it before continuing. you'll get
a lot of arguments about that on this list - linux people tend
to have a 486 or pentium stashed somewhere. :)
Professional musicians and studios have recent hardware, at Right, but
MIDI is integers, and the range defines the resolution.
With floats, why have 2.0 if you can have 1.0...?
To make 1.0 the middle, default position.
ick - if there is a balanced (or even unbalanced)
spectrum of values, center
it at 0, please :)
No, it makes sense for true bipolar data, but here 0 or close
to 0 values have their meaning for parameters like velocity.
It's not exactly like the volume. The spec
should not dictate ABI, either. The ABI is an articat of the
platform. If my platform uses 32 registers to pass C function arguments, it
is already binary imcompatible with your PC :)
The only way to guarantee real portability through platforms
and programming languages is to describe the API at the byte
level. This include calling convention. IMHO We can assume
that every target system has a stack, and can pass parameters
on it. I don't
like having to call normalize functions for every
translation, though. Can the translation overhead be minimized?
It's not a big overhead if done efficiently. VST works this
way for years, and people don't complain about this side at
all. Host just needs to store and pass normalized parameter,
so overhead is not here. It makes even things way simpler
because data is alawys [0;1]/float, which wouldn't be the
case with natural or multi-type parameter handling.