21 Jan
2003
21 Jan
'03
6:04 p.m.
On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 10:00:13PM +0100, David Olofson wrote:
As to AU, I think the use of Objective C is a serious
obstacle. I
also dislike the way they handle scheduling, and the general lack of
consideration for API overhead... But that's another topic!
I dont know that much about AU. I like objective C, but it has some
performace issues. In some ways it would make sense for linux to support
it, it would make porting plugins between MacOS X and Linux easier,
especially if you can make X11 guis for it.
Is it possible to read teh specs without becoming tainted?
That sounds mutually exclusive to me. The owner of the
recommended
standard would have to give up control to a group or standards body,
and well, if the rest of them are anything like Steinberg, it just
won't happen. (Though, people actually change their minds *before*
all is lost, occasionally.)
This has happened with Apple in the past, and I belive that AU is the most
"modern" of the plugin APIs.
On a similar note, what if someone *wants* to destroy
XAP and LADSPA,
and deploys an embrace and extend attack on them? I think we'd better
state that forked projects must not use the original prefixes, or
something... Though, we can't prevent people from reimplementing
LADSPA or XAP, thus bypassing that requirement.
I'm not sure you could do that while retaining the GPL.
Well, both views are motivated. In some ways, a
totally generic,
portable "do it all" plugin API seems doable, but OTOH, looking at
the number of features that everyone wants in it, one can't help
being worried that the size of the SDK will be on par with that of
XFree86. ;-)
Yep, a big, bloaty API is my biggest fear.
Which is why I won't bother selling closed source
software. I'd much
rather have a few people sending patches, than a bunch of paying
customers complaining about the effects my software has on their
dogs, and whatnot. ;-)
Hell yeah, if I released closed source I'd have to do my own beta
testing ;)
BTW, that's rather interesting, put in relation to
the number of
Linux audio hackers as well. How many and how long does it *really*
take to create a complete Linux based studio solution?
Bizarrely, I think we actually spend more time reinventing the wheel than
the commercial guys. We have a lot of low level library reuse, but
everyone and his dog wants to write a WAV editor. Theres also a shortage
of maths, electronics and graphic design skills compared to commercial
developers (for plugins at least).
- Steve