Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] custom GUIs & XML GUIs ...Was: ladspa GUI round 2
From: Paul Davis (pbd_AT_Op.Net)
Date: Sat Mar 31 2001 - 19:08:31 EEST
>I'm not very familiar with complex virtual studio setups, but I guess in some
>cases there would be dozen of plugin GUIs active.
>(what's a realistic case ? anyone ?)
Just as a point of reference (and even though its a source of many
complaints), ProTools only allows a single plugin GUI at a time!
>what if all these plugin GUIs start sending(receiving) tons of events to/from
>host.
how would they do that ? they're driven by the mouse/keyboard.
>Sometime ago I proposed to use only one process per toolkit.
this imposes a source-code requirement on the hosts that i consider
unacceptable. i am not going to spend time providing a Qt-process for
my apps, for example. the standalone process model means that i don't
have to.
>Paul, are you still working on the lib that renders XML plugin-GUIs ?
Not at this time.
>I think most plugins would be perfectly happy the XML GUIs, (standard
>faders,knobs,etc) and only the special ones would need a custom GUI
>written in a native toolkit.
i suspect that most plugins will be happy with the one built
automatically by the host without XML. those that wanted to use XML
will probably really want to do their own thing entirely, if it were
possible.
>In my opinion the IPC stuff should be abstracted and non-blocking (lock-free
>fifos), because we must take into account the cases where a realtime host has
>to deal with dozen of GUI elements that can lead to the GUI stalling for long
>time due to high system load.
we don't care if the GUI stalls. its in a different thread than the audio.
>Traditional IPC mechanisms like unix pipes (4096bytes in size) might fail
>in the above case causing either the loss of events or the blocking of the
>sender which in the case of a lowlatency-audio host would lead to audio
>dropouts.
no, it will not. what are you thinking benno ? we're talking about
communication between the GUI thread of the host and other GUI
processes. how things move from the GUI thread of the host into the
plugins is completely internal to the host, and not part of anything
we've been discussing here.
actually, it doesn't even thave to be the GUI thread of the
host. there might be a thread doing nothing but poll(2) on a socket to
pick up OSC messages.
--p
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