[jazzplusplus-devel] Opinion on PortMidi

[Patrick E. <pa...@pa...>]

The more I think about it, the more I think it's a good idea to go 
with PortMidi.  Here's how it balances out in my head:

Disadvantages:
1.  May be poor support or slow uptake of new APIs.
2.  May be issues with things like latency that are tricky to handle 
without writing more native code.
3.  Need to maintain an extra external dependency.
4.  Needing only one code base might lead to complacency and allow the 
midi code to sprawl all over the place.

Advantages:
1.  Only need to wrote the midi interface code once.
2.  Don't need to figure out how to port nicely between Windows, Mac 
OS X, and ALSA.
3.  It seems to have support behind it, so I like to think that it 
will be updated.

Addressing the disadvantages, #1 may not be an issue for us.  I mean, 
look at how long it's taking to get wxWin2.4 going!  If we want the 
code sooner, we could always write it for the portmidi team.

As for #2, if there are problems we could either send patches that 
improve things or try writing some small midi code hunks that improve 
the situation.  Hopefully it won't be an issue, but even if it is, we 
can try tricks like SCHED_FIFO, which I suspect we might have to do 
anyways.

#3... probably easier to maintain external dependency than to port 
code.

#4... uh.. uhm... no laziness allowed? :)

So, in summary, my personal opinion is that portmidi is probably the 
way to go.

        Patrick