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
