Subject: Re: STL / Qt flame-war (Re: [linux-audio-dev] Audio-related widgets with Qt ?)
From: Thomas Hedler (thomas.hedler_AT_fen-net.de)
Date: Wed Sep 19 2001 - 20:47:40 EEST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Davis" <pbd_AT_Op.Net>
To: <linux-audio-dev_AT_music.columbia.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2001 3:57 AM
Subject: Re: STL / Qt flame-war (Re: [linux-audio-dev] Audio-related widgets
with Qt ?)
> >Let's bring the discussion to some more objective points:
> >What do we want from our toolkit:
> >1) Ease of use to program
> > (there are some musicians under us, too, aren't they?)
> >2) Fast graphic engine
> >3) Maybe compatibility to other platforms (complete with
> > graphic engine, not only the containers...)
> >4) Code readability
> >5) Easy to learn
> >....a.o.i.
> >
> >IMHO I have to say that 1,2,3 is not covered by any
> >libstdc++ or GTK Gui. Because of the Object_Oriented_Wanna_Be
> >programming in GTK you really don't have readability.
>
> I would never advocate the use of GTK+. I would eagerly advocate the
> use of Gtk--, however, which provides a completely C++-idiomatic "thin
> layer" over GTK+, so that there is almost no efficiency loss compared
> to GTK (since almost everything is inlined), but allows a C++
> programmer to work in "comfort".
That is OK. I don't have any experience with that.
> Point 5 is of little interest to me. The most worthwhile things in
> life are rarely easy. The corollary of which, of course, is that some
> really hard things are utterly pointless ;)
:-)
> Point 4 is completely subjective. How readable you find particular
> expressions depends on your language(s) background and other
> experiences.
Maybe you are right. But I'm not persuaded. ;-)
> Point 3 I could personally care less about. Over on the VST plugin
> list a day or so back, I read about a careless pointer bug in a VST
> plugin would crash the entire computer system when Cubase exited. So
> I'm supposed to care about the ease of porting my s/w to a system
> where an application that does "*(random()) = 0xbeefface;" can crash
> the computer? And don't get me started on Windows. BeOS is effectively
> dead. *BSD might be interesting, except there are no low-latency
> patches, and I imagine it suffers from latency issues at least as
> badly as main-line Linux does.
Hm.
> Point 2 is pretty much moot - other than tricks with double buffering,
> which only affect a small subset of what's typically done with
> toolkits, the X Window System is the graphics engine used by GTK and
> Qt in almost every context that I (and perhaps we) care about. I'm
> intrigued by the framebuffer versions of GTK and Qt, but I don't
> really find myself drawn to them and I also doubt that there is much
> of a speed difference between them - the tricks for making s/w
> graphics engines fast are mostly public domain these days.
Speed of the graphics engine is IMHO not the shoot out criteria
for any toolkit we are talking about. But another additional argument.
> Point 1 seems somewhat virtuous, except that to do anything useful
> except writing plugins (which is what I'd prefer non-programmers to be
> doing), the non-programmer will need to learn about threads, mutexes,
> parallel programming in general, and a host of other important but
> trivial details. I suppose it helps to not add the needless
> complexities of a toolkit to the list, but its not the biggest hurdle
> by any means.
>
> But we can agree to disagree. There are more important things in life
> to do, or even just in software to do, than arguing about toolkits and
> languages and libraries. 's fun, though :)))
You are right. I don't want to flame to much (but I can't help it;-) ).
But see my view: I'm running Emagic Logic because:
* it runs most plugins I'm interested
* it works most the time as I want (ease of use)
* I'm personally interested in digital signal processing, so that I
want to program some things but I would also like to have a
waveform view and some knobs in my plugin.
If some of these can be answered by some experts here I switch
to Linux. But Brahms is far away, VST is not here, and I miss
some common widgets with a waveform view and knobs.
I have to do it on my own or have to port it from some other
toolkit. And the startpoint was: _audio_-related widgets with QT?
Thomas
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