tolc VS avendish

I love CLI11! It has been pretty easy all the way through. Used to use lyra before but since I wanted to have subgroups in Tolc I had to switch. Great job on CLI11 if the author is in the chat :)

I'm working on a project called Tolc that is generating bindings from C++ to other languages. When creating bindings to a class MyClass, it needs to be defined before any code using that class (for example a function that returns an instance of it). Therefore I needed to know in which order to define things. Honestly I just had so much fun solving this problem (using some C++20 and features) that I wrote a post so sum it all up:

Hi everyone!

Some friends and I were unhappy with how much work it was to use C++ from other languages. We were working in the optimizations industry and often had to prototype with python. Eventually, we created a tool to make it easier for C++ to talk to python (by generating pybind11). Later, javascript via WebAssembly was added as well. It's now at a point where it's very easy to just create a C++ library and use it from any of those languages without change. We're planning on slowly adding more languages as needed/requested. The next on the list are Swift and Kotlin.

It does not require any change to your existing public interface, but simply reads it and creates the bindings off of that. It should also work on Linux (Debian), MacOS, and Windows (Visual Studio). Here's a small demo if you'd like to test:

https://github.com/Tolc-Software/tolc-demo

And here are the repositories with the source code:

https://github.com/Tolc-Software/tolc - The executable

https://github.com/Tolc-Software/frontend.py - The python bindings generator

https://github.com/Tolc-Software/frontend.wasm - The WebAssembly bindings generator

https://github.com/Tolc-Software/Parser - The C++ parser

It is dual licensed with AGPL and, if someone wants, a commercial license as well.

Would be cool if someone finds it useful!

https://github.com/Tolc-Software/tolc - The executable and CMake wrappers

I’m just gonna drop this here: https://github.com/Tolc-Software/tolc

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