Re: [linux-audio-user] Interview with EnergyXT Developer

On Sat, 2006-11-18 at 11:55 +0800, Chris McCormick wrote: there is no WineLib API. anybody who says otherwise is lying. how do i know this? because when torben and i took kjetil's initial work on running VSTs on linux and tried to do the in-process system we went down this route (using wine as a library) we even wrote some patches for the wine people, in collaboration with the Mono project. we were rebuffed, 100% and completely, because the benevolent dictator of Wine was adamant that Wine is not and will never be a library despite the recurrence of "WineLib" as a term. they have no interest (at this time) in defining an interface to Wine support via a library. no its not. if you check what actually happens under the hood when you do this, you will find that you actually get 2 products: a shared object representing the original windows program and a shell script that uses Wine to execute the shared object. how do i know all this? because we use this in ardour2 (and the current version of FST) to provide the most robust VST support that we can. how does it work? we compile the code that normally makes up the executable for ardour as a shared library, with an special entry point called ardour_main(). then we compile a tiny win32 app that does nothing but start up and call ardour_main(). this is compiled using winegcc. the result is a shell script and a small win32 shared object/.exe file. you run the shell script, it starts wine, which runs the tiny win32 app, which is linked against libardourgtk and calls ardour_main(), and voila ... ardour running inside wine with the best VST support that wine can offer. note that you can substitute cedega for wine and it works slightly better ;) baroque? yep. but this how it actually works ... --p