<< Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2015 12:27:54 -0700 From: Tom Jeffries <[email protected]> To: "[email protected] Audio" Subject: Swift and CoreAudio
Swift is Apple's newest language. How does it work with CoreAudio? >> Off the top of my head, there will be challenges directly manipulating audio buffers, writing interleaved buffers, using ASBDs, populating AudioBufferLists and using existing constants (the constants are not just with CoreAudio) It works but it is very challenging to do so. I spent a lot of time performing workarounds because performing things like sample rate conversions were out of the question using the APIs and there were no solutions for function callbacks. An example of this is using something like AudioConverterFillComplexBuffer. Accessing audio buffers directly was an difficult because the prescribed and almost secretive way (because it's not documented) is read only. Attempts to write (manipulate) an audio buffer directly in Swift can be done but not in any documented way, which was entirely frustrating. I don’t think I ever figured out how to read and write interleaved buffers which should have been easy. Creating ASBDs and determining how to populate an AudioBufferLists took some time to figure out because the way that you would do so in ObjC is different and if I recall correctly, the translation is not even close to obvious. One thing that really bothered me was needing to use an existing constant but in Swift it was considered an unmanaged CFString and having to jump through hoops to use the constant or just make a new string to supplant it. If kCoreAudioConstant in the headers was a string in ObjC but an unmanaged CFString in Swift, it takes some hoop jumping do use kCoreAudioConstant in your program. That was the stuff off the top of my head. Now, with that being said, there are always going to challenges in using something new, especially new programming languages. Mindsets, paradigms along with the obvious syntax changes will need to be made. I very much like Swift but there are a great number of adjustments that need to be made and the language and IDE are still evolving. In terms of CoreAudio, it has been a difficult journey. I've re-written a few programs and had number of times that I felt that I was in a desert, searching for water because the existing documentation is geared toward C-ObjC and there do not seem to be many people interested in using CoreAudio and Swift. Could it be because of documentation, lack of Swift-CoreAudio examples, translation of existing programs is challenging, the evolving nature of the language or maybe a combination of the above? I would like to see people interested in Swift and CoreAudio make examples, document what works, what can be bridged and what cannot from their perspective be bridged at all. I like Swift and CoreAudio and would like the two work well together, even if we (initially) have to work a little harder to get to get the job done. W. _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Coreaudio-api mailing list ([email protected]) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/coreaudio-api/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [email protected]
