avendish VS wxWidgets

Happy to introduce you to https://ossia.io there are a lots of tasks open! You can check the projects for the general development axes: https://github.com/ossia/score/projects?query=is%3Aopen ; e.g. Audio, Musicality, Integrations, JACK & Linux integration (some are in Classic projects mode) all have audio-related tasks, some easy, some hard.

Creating new Avendish plug-ins (docs: https://celtera.github.io/avendish/) could also be fairly useful, here's a very basic example one: https://github.com/celtera/avendish/blob/main/examples/Advan...

If you are interested in making max, pd, etc... extension you can look into https://github.com/celtera/avendish : it's made exactly for this and tries to stay very close from standard C++ unlike most existing audio frameworks which often come with their own bespoke standard library reimplementation. The documentation also tries to explain the c++ features it used, you might find this useful!

to automatically generate safe dlopen stubs for runtime dynamic library loading from header files

and through the C++ one (this one is an extremely quick and dirty prototype):

https://github.com/ossia/score/blob/master/src/plugins/score...

to pre-instantiate get(aggregate), for_each(aggregate, f) and other similar functions in https://github.com/celtera/avendish because of how slow it is when done through TMP (doing it that way removed literally dozens of megabytes from my .o and had a positive performance impact even with -O3) ; so I weep a lot when I read that people in the committee object to pack...[indexing]

I really don't know about this, I'm writing audio & media effects in a fairly declarative style with https://github.com/celtera/avendish and I'm so much more productive that it's not even funny - I can rewrite entire effects from scratch in the time that it used to take me to find a bug somewhere

For anyone using c++, my declarative system has some amount of support for clap: https://github.com/celtera/avendish / https://celtera.github.io/avendish/

But unlike clap, targetting this also gives direct access to a few other environments, namely Max, Pd, ossia score, with the list hopefully growing.

Here is an example minimal plugin : https://github.com/celtera/avendish/blob/main/examples/Raw/M...

Note that unlike pretty much every other c/c++ plugin API, the plugin code does not need to include any header, everything is done through reflection of struct members at compile-time.

Here's a per-sample noise generator which uses a small library of pre-made ports: https://github.com/celtera/avendish/blob/main/examples/Helpe...

And a very naive buffer-based audio filter : https://github.com/celtera/avendish/blob/main/examples/Helpe...

UI is supported without relying on a specific UI library, only on a canvas painter concept which can then target Qt, NanoVG, and others to come: https://github.com/celtera/avendish/blob/main/examples/Helpe...

since it binds directly to audio APIs at compile time, it has pretty much zero code size in itself, the smallest plugin it generates for VST2 is around 7kb IIRC

I've ported my lib https://github.com/celtera/avendish to P1061's experimental clang implementation to replace boost.pfr (https://github.com/celtera/avendish/blob/main/include/avnd/common/aggregates.hpp#L67) and it works great, it's only missing pack indexing because right now one still needs to do something like

Working on a sunset of this with https://github.com/celtera/avendish - C++ reflection makes this very easy

so interesting, as a mostly C++ dev, UE's C++ style feels absolutely awful aha. Of course they have to be here because c++ used to not have reflection but I think that nowadays one could use similar principles as the ones I've tried to develop for audio / media objects in https://github.com/celtera/avendish to implement game objects / UObject in a much cleaner way and with better compile times

The Elixir programming language is no stranger to desktop applications as the language actually supports building them out of the box. It uses wxWidgets: a C++ library that lets developers create applications for Windows, macOS, Linux and other platforms with a single code base. But wxWidgets has a very complex API, and doesn’t solve issues that usually come with desktop applications around packaging.

Qt is also 100% open/free. In fact, both are available under the LGPL, just that wxWidgets also grants an exception to not have to distribute application sources even when statically linked:

https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets#licence

But for big programs, ones written in C++? Good luck it won’t be easy at all. You might try wxwidgets or qt. I do not predict trying to click box-ify complex cli tools yielding much success.

In theory, you should be able to use FFI to interface with something like wxWindows, but you might again have problems on macOS, I don't know. And to me eyes, Wx looks a bit outdated.

This seems to be like the classic wxWidgets [1], i.e. it's an API that wraps the underlying platform's default toolkit. So on Windows it uses Windows' native controls, in Linux it seems to use GTK, and so on.

That means that the advantage is being able to write against one API, and get cross-platform compatibility, which can be nice. It also means (typically) being limited in what you can do to the least common denominator, or you (=the toolkit author) end up having to re-implement features from one platform that you want to expose but that are missing on some supported target(s). Or, of course, have an API with non-portable parts in it.

In any case, it means the "look and feel" is not the core feature of the API since that is going to be "like the target platform" and that is the point.

Given the origin, I guess Lua support is important too, here.

[1]: https://www.wxwidgets.org/

- So, I found wxWidgets. Which looked good. However, when I followed some tutorials I was getting errors. Even when I copied and pasted the tutorial code. Furthermore, the library still doesn't seem to simplify the process much.

It is the icon for WXWidgets, a programming toolkit for making user interfaces that work on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

In general, people will use a cross-platform library to port such applications. While QT will likely never really stabilize (I'd flag it unsustainable), the https://www.wxwidgets.org/ is able to be statically linked into commercial and opensource projects at no cost without tripping GPL.

"Hiring a senior C++ developer with GTK experience is costlier"

I think you are confusing skill valuation, and operational productivity. Some have an erroneous notion talent is interchangeable. Likewise, applicants with identical base skill-sets on their CV often mistakenly believe they even have long-term employment options (outsourced, youth tax credit churn, and or senior wage suppression).

Most FOSS people are easier to train, as most already can mitigate utter chaos already. =)

There are a few like that in the C++ community. WxWidgets is the most famous/popular with this approach. But it is a library almost impossible to use in other languages because their api is heavily templated.