If you are considering iPlug2 vs. JUCE

[hibrasil]

Hello, Oli here.

I don't really know why nasty personal attacks like this are allowed on this forum (mods?). Unlike most people here I am not hiding behind an alias (edit - apart from my early 2000's "hibrasil alias!).

Hopefully Oli will accept criticism, don't take it personally, understand the frustration and fix the issues with the graphics backends and other issues.

The problem with your attitude is that you are expecting something from me. It's nice that you say you'll donate once you've made your product (I've heard that a lot). But - why not try and fix "the graphics issues" yourself and make a pull request? This is the spirit of open source software. BTW - If you're the same user that's just been posting random skia build errors to the slack channel with no context then, I don't know how to help you other than try and guide you how to report issues clearly, because I have no idea what these graphics issues are!

[rafa1981]

The amount of entitlement and selfishness some people has never ceases to surprise me.

I use JUCE, but I was even ready to comment on the part you quoted the day it was posted because it triggers me. I didn't because that day I didn't need more negativity, but I should have.

[letopo]

the problem with your attitude

says someone who writes:

"It's nice that you say you'll donate once you've made your product (I've heard that a lot)."

bye, I got tired, it is not fair that they treat us with such mistrust, and that they pressure you if you ask a question but you are not a contributor, I am going to JUCE where I just saw that everything they claim to have: works.

I thought it would be two weeks of work to adapt the code but it is already well under way.

[hibrasil]

fine, JUCE is great!

[hibrasil]

Originally I didn’t want to engage with this thread, but I’d had a few glasses of wine on Friday and, like rafa1981, I found the latest post triggering. It’s very hard not to take things personally when people are directly attacking you (on a forum where you've been a member for ~20 years), or bumping a thread like this to spite you. I’d like to say thanks here to the various people who’ve chimed in to back me up, and to explain what is reasonable to expect from commercial vs passion/free-time project.

Considering the non-commercial nature of the project, and the monumental effort involved to get it where it is over the last few years, I expect a certain politeness when people join in with the communities (probably very naive of me considering it's 2021). I find it very difficult to deal with, when a few people come, mainly in order to “express their frustration” and/or being overtly negative, SHOUTING, expecting me to read their mind, asking relentless questions (rather than trying themselves), or giving unsolicited advice. In particular, expecting me to prioritise things and to work on them for free, is really irritating. The two belligerent posters in this thread for instance, think that I should be prioritising the opposite things.

These days I have a full time job and I don’t have as much time as I would like to dedicate to iPlug2, although I am still working on it, as time permits. If I see someone post a question in the slack, I’m inclined to help, but often it might be a one word answer. If they haven’t introduced themselves, or appear ungrateful and unfriendly, or if I’m a bit stressed, I might appear a bit “short/abrupt/rude” with people, even though I am still trying to help. I’m going to try and do better at this in future interactions. To any genuinely nice person IRL that I’ve accidentally offended - I’m sorry. If you're a non-native english speaker and something has been lost in translation - I'm sorry. I want the iPlug2 forum and the slack channel to be non-toxic, welcoming places.

It really doesn't matter whether people want to use JUCE or iPlug2 to make their plug-ins. JUCE has a very large community nowadays and there are many people who step in to help others on the forums, myself included. Hopefully iPlug2 will keep growing and there will be less pressure on me to do all the things. Even though JUCE is excellent, there is a lot of value in having a viable non-commercial framework, many of its own advantages, with a liberal license, as an alternative. There are plenty of people who experience frustrations with JUCE too. Multi-cross platform/cross plug-in format frameworks are hard work, and all software development requires a degree of patience!

I really hope this doesn't escalate more, since it's exhausting. I would like to use the little energy and time I have to improve iPlug2, rather than feeling like I have to defend myself against attacks like this.

Thanks to all the supporters of my work.

Peace!

Oli

[Hink]

TY Oli

[Full Bucket]

there is a lot of value in having a viable non-commercial framework, many of its own advantages, with a liberal license, as an alternative.

This. Thanks for your work Oli.

Cheers, Björn

[mystran]

Multi-cross platform/cross plug-in format frameworks are hard work, and all software development requires a degree of patience!

I think this is really the part that people might not understand if they've never written such a framework themselves, because it's really not just a matter of implementing the same functionality on multiple platforms, but it's also this huge puzzle of trying to find ways to build wrappers that implement the same functionality the same way everywhere, consistently even in all reasonable corner cases, even though the underlying platform APIs might have totally different ideas of how things work.

These difference start from the very basics too. Even something as simple as mouse dragging behaves sufficiently different between Windows and macOS that you'll pretty much need to emulate the behaviour of one on the other (eg. explicit captures on Windows vs. implicit captures on macOS) if you want to expose a consistent API... and let's not even start about keyboard.

Most people pick a cross-platform toolkit precisely because they don't want to deal with this kind of stuff, but it's important for them to realize that someone has to do it for the cross-platform toolkit to exist.. and that's before we even get to real framework things like figuring out how to put a scrolling panel inside a scrolling panel without having the scrollbars randomly flicker in and out when the layout can't decide whether a scrollbar should or should not be included.

[rafa1981]

And you didn't even name VST3... All those things are a big boring chore.

[mystran]

And you didn't even name VST3... All those things are a big boring chore.

In my experience it's usually not so much about any particular API or another, but rather more about the combinatorial explosion of things that can go wrong when you try support multiple alternatives.

[xoxos]

those combinations can do a number on you.

like many of the souls around here, oli has been a public contributor for two decades, mainly known to me as someone who pops in with free stuff a lot.

confusion and rage are just part of the environment, since the internet connects to southern arizona. if someone is angry or an asshole or pisses all over you, that's just animals. each thread is like a litter box. since few people are going to retain a negative impression of oli from this one post, there's no reason to manufacture one for the person blighted by god knows what misadventure.

my natal sun (aquarius, opposite leo) is 90 degrees square saturn opposite jupiter, which expresses a lifetime of opposition from authority. if "those combinations" can mess up, they're _going_ to mess up for me. it's why, as much as i appreciate iplug, i have always refused that path. but i also have a couple of strong points, which i believe equate to some benefit to our common practice. every time someone works on a "helping interface" i always wish they'd instead aspire to elicit the fundament. "where roads are made i lose my way". but we're different.

[ODDSound]

Support and love for Oli here. It's certainly not easy to have a full-time dev job and constantly find motivation to do development in your down-time, especially on something as complex as iPlug, which is for the benefit of other people. Comments like this on top of all that are just hard to deal with mentally and very much a distraction from fixing issues that inspired them in the first place.

[graywolf2004]

I use the older version of WDL-OL and I'm quite happy with it. Initially, it allowed me to jump into my freeware plugin development and skip learning all the details regarding VST, AU, GUI drawing on both Windows and Mac. Later I got into that code to check how things work and modified a few things here and there. I'm not using iPlug2, maybe will migrate some day, but now I'm happy with the older iPlug, it just works for me. I'm checking the iPlug2 repo when I have problems/bugs to see if the things changed and sometimes just copy/paste the updated code. So in short - it is great thing for me, as I don't hesitate to get into the code, learn and fix things myself.
But overall I can't say it was buggy, it was quite stable and good even back then in 2014, the fixes I made are mostly the taste thing and some specifics of my plugin, which I integrated into IPlugBase and IGraphics classes.
Thanks Oliver to bringing this thing to the world! Without it I wouldn't probably start plugin development, or it would be much slower.

[kingozrecords]

It's difficult sometimes online. I remember in the past on a forum I was providing material explaining various facets of dsp and techniques that went beyond the norm of what was possible.

And yet, I was barraged by an individual who had some status on the board and it was frustrating. When the smoke cleared many good things happened on the 64 bit end with flowstone, and that's great.

It's difficult, but if you're able to make a product that you're happy with it's good. I'd suggest that you make any product as simple as possible so that you can always port it to another codebase. I just bought a mac mini with an M1 chip, but m2 is coming. Lol, how frustrating is that.

Dsp is dsp, whether it be flowstone, synthedit, juce or iplug. I suggest the flowstone alpha for vst2, because any substantial graphic elements do not belong in a plug-in.

If you learn ruby then you can make a very basic gui. But you'll need something else for mac and pro tools. Have you considered Bluecat's plug n' script? You could then focus on the dsp. It's all about math; not functions and what have you.

Juce lost sight of that too. So much visual stuff. But if the dsp math is sound; then you can do everything required. Keep it simple.

[quikquak]

“I just bought a mac mini with an M1 chip, but m2 is coming.”

"The needle returns to the start of the song
And we all sing along like before"
Sorry.
https://youtu.be/peJr2sEhCNY?t=158