I'm planning to implement a VST host for a cross-platform application I'm developing.
Which version of VST should I prefer, VST-2 or VST-3? It seems that VST-2 is depreciated but most other host applications still use that rather than 3.
Are there any examples which will build on Linux (Ubuntu) that have got a host built in and are licensed BSD or similar? I've got no issue with JUCE except after a day of trying that, there are too many build issues on Linux for the VST host example.
The application is written in C++.
Definitely VST2.x. I would not call the VST2 standard "deprecated", so much as VST3 is "DOA". ;) Almost all commercial sequencers support VST2, hardly any (except for Steinberg's Cubase, of course) support VST3. As far as plugins go, almost all plugin manufacturers support VST2, but much fewer ship a VST3 plugin.
The reasons why very few plugins/hosts made the jump to VST3 are among the following:
There are very no real technical advantages to the VST3 API compared to the tools offered by the VST2 API
The VST3 API is significantly larger and harder to understand than VST2
VST3 is not backwards-compatible to VST2; it's basically a completely different plugin standard
As for a Linux-compatible VST2 example, check out MrsWatson, which is licensed under BSD (full disclaimer: I'm the author and maintainer of this project).
What is the right solution for multi-platform deployment of a Firefox extension which uses native c++ code? Is it possible to integrate all compiled binaries for different platforms in a single extension? Is it possible to download the only needed binaries (compiled from native c++ code) for the current machine?
Thanks.
Firefox is dropping support for binary components. It says:
Developers who rely on binary XPCOM should update their code as soon
as possible to prevent compatibility issues. If you have any questions
or comments about this move, please do so in the
mozilla.dev.extensions newsgroup.
I've been reading quite a bit about Thrift and it looks like a technology I'd really like to use. I'm having all sorts of trouble building the Windows distribution. I know a patch exists to build a Windows version, however I have not had much luck with this either.
Does anyone know of a pre-built distribution for Windows?
Or any suggestions on how to get the latest version of Thrift built (without turning my Windows machine into a pseudo *nix box).
Thanks
Rich
Thrift 0.8 now has VS projects for both the compiler and C++ library. Get the snapshot release or the latest off of SVN
http://thrift.apache.org/download/
Edit: 0.8 has been officially released and the source is available as a tarball on the download page.
Edit2: The SVN trunk now has a cross-platform sample project under thrift/contrib/transport-sample
I ported the client part of Thrift to Windows C++ for my own open-source project. It should be easily usable in other Win32 or WinCE projects.
http://peoplesnote.codeplex.com - src\Evernote API\Thrift
Yes there is, just download the exe from here:
http://thrift.apache.org/download/
exe listed for download there is standalone executable, no installation is needed.
I have used it to generate Smalltalk code, did not test other languages.
How to run c++ applications in android using cygwin. Any tutorial in this regard is appreciated..
You cannot directly run C++ applications in Android.
Android can run only applications written using the Android SDK, but yes you can re-use your native(C/C++) libraries for Android.
You will have to recompile all the native libraries specifically for Android. And you do need the source code for all 3rd party native libs you plan to use simply because Usually when we compile and link these libraries outside Android they are linked to glibc but unfortunately Android doesn't use glibc due to liscence and performance issues. Android uses a watered down version of glibc called libc. It has matching symbol names to glibc for most of the usual functionalities. But as far as i know the libc doesn't have some functionality related to Strings and it definitely doesnt have some posix support. If your native libraries are using any of the deprecated functionality you will have to find workaround for those by using alternative functionality supported by libc and coding your libs accordingly.
Also, you will have to use the NDK to interface Java(Android app/fwk) to native world(C++). And then write a Android application on top of that.
Though this sounds pretty simple in my experience compiling native libraries on Android(Android porting) has traditionally been very time consuming with no guarantee of sucesses.
You will want the Java Native Interface, or "JNI".
See: "Java Native Interface Wiki" "Android JNI Tips" and links therein. It is some work to get this going and to get used to how it goes. I managed it from the references given here with C and it will work out after some time and faith without further help if you follow all the steps.
Can I do Android programming in C++, C? If the answer is "yes" then please tell how? And what's the procedure to set up?
I don't know Obj-C, Java, but well-versed in C, C++, Flash AS3, SDK released by Google.
Please do not tell about NVDIA SDK it's not fully developed :)
PLEASE NOTE: THE ANSWER BELOW IS HORRIBLY OUTDATED, AND MIGHT NOT BE ENTIRELY CORRECT ANYMORE.
You can program in C/C++ using the Android NDK. You'll have to wrap your c++ codebase in a static library and load that through a Java wrapper & JNI.
The standard NDK does not support RTTI and a lot of the functionality of standard c++ is also not available such as std::string, etc. To solve this you can recompile the NDK. Dmitry Moskalchuk supplies a modified version of the NDK that supports this at http://www.crystax.net/android/ndk-r3.php. This modified version works on all Android phones that run on an ARM processor.
Depending on the kind of application you should decide to use Java or C/C++. I'd use C/C++ for anything that requires above average computational power and games -- Java for the rest.
Just pick one language and write the majority of your application in that language; JNI calls can decrease your performance by a lot. Java isn't that hard though -- if you know how to program in C/C++. The advantage of Java is that the application can run on any device running Android, where as NDK applications depend on the architecture it was compiled for.
You should use Android NDK to develop performance-critical portions of your apps in native code. See Android NDK.
Anyway i don't think it is the right way to develop an entire application.
Yes, you can program Android apps in C++ (for the most part), using the Native Development Kit (NDK), although Java is the primary/preferred language for programming Android, and your C++ code will likely have to interface with Java components, and you'll likely need to read and understand the documentation for Java components, as well. Therefore, I'd advise you to use Java unless you have some existing C++ code base that you need to port and that isn't practical to rewrite in Java.
Java is very similar to C++, I don't think you will have any problems picking it up... going from C++ to Java is incredibly easy; going from Java to C++ is a little more difficult, though not terrible. Java for C++ Programmers does a pretty good job at explaining the differences. Writing your Android code in Java will be more idiomatic and will also make the development process easier for you (as the tooling for the Java Android SDK is significantly better than the corresponding NDK tooling)
In terms of setup, Google provides the Android Studio IDE for both Java and C++ Android development (with Gradle as the build system), but you are free to use whatever IDE or build system you want so long as, under the hood, you are using the Android SDK / NDK to produce the final outputs.
You should look at MoSync too, MoSync gives you standard C/C++, easy-to-use well-documented APIs, and a full-featured Eclipse-based IDE. Its now a open sourced IDE still pretty cool but not maintained anymore.
You can take a look also at C++ Builder XE6, and XE7 supports android in c++ code, and with Firemonkey library.
http://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder
Pretty easy way to start, and native code. But the binaries have a big size.
You can use the Android NDK, but answers should note that the Android NDK app is not free to use and there's no clear open source route to programming Android on Android in an increasingly Android-driven market that began as open source, with Android developer support or the extensiveness of the NDK app, meaning you're looking at abandoning Android as any kind of first steps programming platform without payments.
Note: I consider subscription requests as payments under duress and this is a freemium context which continues to go undefeated by the open source community.
There is more than one library for working in C++ in Android programming:
C++ - qt (A Nokia product, also available as LGPL)
C++ - Wxwidget (Available as GPL)