[gmpi] Re: Topic 5: Threading

  • From: lists@xxxxxxxxxx
  • To: gmpi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2003 14:48:27 -0400

At 2:21 PM -0400 4/15/03, Angus F. Hewlett wrote:

Marc, I agree 100%.
[snip]
On Tue, 15 Apr 2003, Marc Poirier wrote:
[snip] 
 > Well, I think that
 > developers will stop circumventing it if they can't get away with that
 > anymore.  Let's not give up before we even started and pander to
 > developers' laziness.  Let's do things right from the beginning and let
 > the developers start doing things right before they accumulate a
 > collection of legacy code that fails to meet our needs and expectations in
 > the near future.

I think I agree with this sentiment (except that the group is contemplating giving up), but I have some observations from past experiences working with audio developers. (Full disclosure: I'm no engineer.)

Good developers take shortcuts when they:
- cannot accomplish something necessary without breaking the rules
- can't readily understand how to do something properly due to
  inadequate documentation or sheer API complexity
- find it an order of magnitude easier, or quicker, to do something
  the wrong way
- (other obvious things I can't remember at the moment)

I don't find any of those first three things to be essentially "laziness."

The current effort, with a lot of great brains hard at work, has more than enough of a chance to nip those problems in the bud. Rather than putting the finger on lazy developers, there's a chance to make it easier for them to do the right thing. Others with direct experience will probably have to weigh in on whether separating GUI/DSP enables or disables that.

Personally (and perhaps in a slightly desperate attempt to haul this back on topic), I would favor splitting them, if only because I would advocate a system whereby plug-ins are able, but not required, to specify the the types and data bounds of GUI elements required for user control, and let the host display a GUI appropriate for that host's look & feel. (This would probably work best for simpler plug-ins that only require sliders, checkboxes, text fields, etc.)

Cheers,
Jim Rippie

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