Subject: Re: [ecasound] SuperEcasound (was: Re: Music-specific features)
From: Kai Vehmanen (k_AT_eca.cx)
Date: Tue Aug 26 2003 - 23:50:30 EEST
On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, S. Massy wrote:
>> b) compile and link times; on my fastest machine it takes over half an
>> hour to compile Ecasound; this means it's pretty impossible to
>> work ~0.5h every day with Ecasound, I have to find time for
>> a whole evening
> Would it help to bring ecasound to a greater level of modularity? I
> admit I haven't really looked at ecasound's source code in the last year
> but, back then, it used to be pretty hairy and scary for the
> non-initiated. I believe a plugin interface of sorts existed for rt
> objects drivers but that was about it. Perhaps separating everything
Hmm, Ecasound's architecture in fact _is_ very modular. One reason why it
might look a bit hairy is that object-orientation is heavily used.
Nowadays almost all objects are implementations of some abstract interface
(i.e. plugins of some type). You have plugin-type interfaces for audio
objects, effects, controllers, engine drivers (like JACK), MIDI i/o
devices, etc, etc. Without this modularity I suspect we would have hit the
maintainability limit much sooner than the current limit of ~60k lines. Or
at least that's how I like to look at it. ;)
> cleanly: engine, effects (with each effect in its own subdir), and so
> forth, would help maintainability, speed up recompilation and help
> tentative developpers to find their way up and down the source tree more
> easily? Just a thought...
Reorganizing the physical layout of the source-tree might help to speed up
the build process for partial builds (when not all components require
recompilation), but would also be a huge (boring) change to do. Also, a
full build would still be as slow as ever.
[possible SuperEcasound features]
> Or just plain variables to hold values and a special type for markers.
> examples: copy, cut, paste, export region to file, etc.
> - A special mechanism to help managing parameters of complex LADSPA
> plugins.
These are all great ideas!
-- http://www.eca.cx Audio software for Linux!
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