[JPZ]

Originally Posted by schwa

Here's my 2c.

VST sucks as we all know. It's a bad spec, and there isn't any "support" of any kind (it's hard to even type that without snickering), etc. The VST SDK is absurd, it's just an empty class containing function stubs that get called by the VST dispatcher function, the SDK itself adds zero functionality or flexibility beyond just dressing up the dispatcher opcode in slightly different clothing.

But! VST is very basic and easy to follow. You can write your own framework around the VST headers (there are dozens of such frameworks out there and some are quite good). There's never more than one layer of VST crud itself so you can debug stuff without needing to keep an infinite stack trace in your head.

The AU SDK is completely different. It's very highly designed and opaque. The overall design of the thing is much more carefully thought out than VST, the SDK is a bunch of actual encapsulations that give us a small number of fairly well defined places where we enter it. But because of the opacity and complexity, the SDK contains dozens of files and hundreds of functions and templates and multiply inherited methods, control can bounce around and back and forth and it is extremely hard to debug the SDK itself without maintaining a huge context in your head.

In giving us this SDK, Apple is saying, "trust us." There's nothing wrong with complexity a priori, but if Apple is going to give us this opaque turnkey SDK, it really needs to work *perfectly*.

It doesn't.

Wow, I didn't understand one word of that.