Re: [ecasound] LV2 Plugin Support

From: Jeremy Salwen <jeremysalwen@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Fri Aug 12 2011 - 00:09:02 EEST

Hi Kai,

I just found lilvmm.hpp which is included in lilv, a c++ wrapper around
lilv. It iimplements a lot of what I'm looking for. I'll just do a
singleton, but using the lilvmm wrapper structs.

Jeremy

On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 5:57 AM, Kai Vehmanen <kvehmanen@email-addr-hidden> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Wed, 10 Aug 2011, Jeremy Salwen wrote:
>
> 1. Memory management
>>
>
> I'll answer these in separate mails.
>
>
> As for memory management, part of me is confused on how exactly ecasound
>> handles things, and part of me is just unsure what I should do in this
>> case. Bascially, from what I can tell, ecasound keeps a map of
>> string->Object around which includes *all* possible effects, and this map is
>> never freed. Lilv uses something called the "LilvWorld", which
>>
>
> Yes. To keep things simple(r), there are no separate descriptor-types
> and/or per-object factory functions in the codebase. Instead for each
> distinct object type, one instance of the class is actually created and
> stored and associated with a object id (e.g. -etd is attached to an instance
> of EFFECT_DELAY class) and this is done in eca-static-object-maps. When new
> objects (for actual use) are instantiated, the existing object for the
> requested type is cloned (with clone() or new_expr()). Thus we don't need
> to separately describe the meta-data (parameter names, param hints, etc),
> but instead we create one class instance and use its methods to get the
> information directly. Same
> code can be reused at runtime to query info about the plugins, using
> the same interface.
>
> The intent was to reduce the amount of boilerplate code and abstractions,
> but it can be argued whether this is simpler in the end. With some effort,
> the needed metadata could be extracted and exposes outside the
> implementation classes, but this is extra code (for each plugin) I wanted to
> avoid. Dunno how beneficial this simplication is in the end, but at least I
> have been pretty happy with it so far (design dates back to early days in
> the 90s ;)).
>
> As for the allocation lifecycle, it's actually not entirely static. If you
> use no chainops, the object maps are never created. The object maps heavily
> use the singleton design pattern (see eca-object-factory.cpp for how the
> singleton logic is implemented in ecasound).
>
> But you are right that once the singleton is allocated, it stays allocated
> forever.
>
> For LV2, if LilvWorld is sufficiently small, I'd recommend making it a
> singleton with an implementation like in eca-object-factory.cpp. E.g. you
> provide a helper function to get a reference to a LilvWorld object.
> Everybody that needs to use a populated LilvWorld just uses this function to
> get a reference. If nobody uses this code path (e.g. not using any LV2
> plugins), LilvWorld never gets allocated.
>
> You can probably copy/duplicate the code for LADSPA in eca-object-factory
> and eca-static-object-maps for LV2. If the LV2 plugins are loaded by a
> separate function in eca-object-factory.h, that will make sure the singleton
> is not created unless needed. It's then upto the parser
> (eca-chainsetup-parser.cpp) to call the appropriate eca-object-factory.h
> methods to create objects. For LADSPA and LV2, the logic in
> eca-static-object-maps.cpp is a bit different compared to native objects
> like EFFECT_DELAY (where one-class == one type).
>
>
> *never* free the LilvWorld, as ECA_OBJECT_FACTORY will always contain
>> references to LV2 plugins which would be invalidated if I were to free it.
>> So I was thinking of a couple possible options of dealing with the
>> LilvWorld: #1, I could store it statically in some class ...but I'm
>>
>
> So I'd vote for this. Make the LilvWorld object a singleton and access it
> with a function lke those in eca-object-factory.h. Then it gets only created
> if somebody uses LV2, but when created, remains allocated forever.
>
> PS And to be nice for valgrind and other memory debuggers, it might
> be a good idea to wrap LilvWorld into a simpler wrapper class that
> has a destructor that calls lilv_world_free(). This way the singleton
> won't show up as a memory-leak in memdebuggers at process exit. But
> this is finetuning already, not a major concern...

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Received on Fri Aug 12 00:15:04 2011

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