Re: [Linuxsampler-devel] Re: Prgramming Languages

[Juan L. <co...@re...>]

On Tue, 29 Oct 2002 15:55:41 -0600
"Richard A. Smith" <rs...@bi...> wrote:

> Benno:
> 
> Good to see you back in business again.  I'm looking forward to
> burning up the free time I don't have messing with linuxsampler.
> 
> My vote on programming languages would be C++.  Really, if you code
> things in a modular and decoupled way like all the books preach then
> you C looks and acts like C++ anyway.  Unless you are really doing
> some fancy template run time typing stuff there is little difference
> between C and C++.
> 

I couldnt agree more! So I second that vote.

> In 90% of the code you _won't_ need the speed advantage that C
> offers.  Which is largely a myth anyway its more the programmer than
> the language.  Yes there are some run time issues with C++ but unless
> you are really carefull about how you code your C it probally won't
> be the language choice that slows things down.  GCC is amazingly good
> at optimizing things once you tweak the parameters right.

Such is true, I wouldnt care about optimization either since gcc does a fantastic work.
I wrote my tracker in C++, and the mixing is actually faster than mikmod (which is written in C).

> 
> I grew up learning C and that doing things via pointers was always
> faster than using arrays.  Yeah, 10 years ago this was true but GCC
> broke me of this.  My best attempt at stepper motor control algo I
> was working on was soundly stomped on by just using arrays and
> letting GCC optimize.  
> 

The same happened to me recently while doing ARM development.
If you do things the "normal" way (ie using indexes and stuff)
in most cases gcc will be able to optimize better than if you
do the optimization yourself. I've even seen many cases recently
of people who tried to write asm modules to optimize and ended up
frustrated that gcc optimized more than their asm code.

> 
> Oh and I like the socket interface for the GUI to engine
> communication.  This allows them to be on different machines or even
> different architectures which considering the Mac heavy world that
> most studios have is probally a good thing.
> 

Yeah, I had in mind that musicans could build
a linux box only to dedicate it to a sampler..
(in other words, building a cheap sampler box, since most commercial
ones are over 2k USD). This way frontends can be done natively in any
OS without having to resort to more complicated things such as
the X protocol/Xlib/etc and without the sampler needing to have
all those libs installed.

And it could also be good if, in a future, we want to profit from this
project by selling PCs specially built, configured and tuned in 
such a way that they cant be distinguished from a real hardware samplers :)

Cheers!
Juan Linietsky