Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Mustajuuri -> LADSPA plugins.
From: Paul Davis (pbd_AT_Op.Net)
Date: Sun Apr 01 2001 - 18:18:42 EEST
>> you're talking about reimplementing everything that Motif, Xt,
>> GTK+, Qt, FLTK, XForms and many others have done.
>
>No. I'm talking about wrapping low level rendering APIs, such as the
>X protocol, fbdev direct rendering, Win32 GDI, SDL + various graphics
>primitive libs, the lower levels of GDK etc etc.
which is *precisely* what GTK+, Qt, FLTK and XForms do: they wrap a
*low level* rendering API with a higher-level one that is actually
useful to most people. being able to draw lines on the screen gives
rise to GUI's like the one for KeyKit. If thats what you want, fine.
>> if you want to do something like this, then reimplement libvstgui,
>> which seems to be pretty adequate for the win/mac VST plugin
>> crowd.
>
>If it's "pretty adequate", why is it bypassed in favor of rendering
>directly using the underlying rendering API...?
its not. my impression is that 99% of all new VST plugins use
libvstgui. there are many that don't because they were written before
libvstgui was developed.
>I'm not talking about implementing a GUI toolkit (because *that's* a
>total waste of time, if anything, it seems, at least when it comes to
>plugin GUIs), but rather something truly portable to use for custom
>rendering GUIs and *possibly* some existing toolkits, like GTK+ and
>Qt.
why?
>Yeah, right; perhaps I should implement the X protocol on top of SDL
>instead - or just make sure to stay away from closed source plugins
>that won't run without X.
look: every time someone develops a toolkit, its theoretically
independent of the underlying rendering system. it just so happens
that very few toolkits have taken the step of providing an
implementation that supports more than 1 rendering system (i.e. the X
Window System). Recently, Qt and GTK have done just that, and I
applaud them for it. But that doesn't provide much support in my mind
for developing something that (1) is so low level that anybody that
uses it has to do all the stuff that the "toolkits" do anyway OR
(2) is a toolkit.
--p
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