[hctaw]

I tried out SOUL back when it was first unveiled and I have some questions for the 1.0 release:

- Is time/frequency analysis and its analogs a first class citizen? (STFT, wavelets, other real-time spectral/cepstral algorithms)

- How do I embed the SOUL runtime into an application? Can SOUL scripts be used like user scripts in a larger application?

[julesrms]

Full support for wide streams (i.e. streams of overlapping windowed blocks, suitable for frequency-domain work) is still to-do (though we've planned for it all along!)

We've tried to make embedding it as easy as possible - there's a DLL, and a simple COM interface and a few header-only C++ classes to load and JIT-compile a patch dynamically. We have an example project showing how to do this. FWIW Tracktion Waveform is doing exactly this, and only has a few hundred lines of glue code to enable patches in a full-blown DAW.

[hctaw]

Good to hear! I'll stay in C/C++ until its ready then - I look forward to not needing to prototype in one language and implement in another, but for now the biggest motivator is how easy it is to do spectral/cepstral things in MATLAB (bit of a pain to write windowing code in C++, hard to test, and easy to get wrong).

Why COM (and is it actually COM, or is it COM-inspired like VST3)? It's a bit of a pain to interface with it from hosting languages (C is much more straightforward, particularly when worrying about C++ exception safety and garbage collection).

[julesrms]

Why COM? Well, I hate COM in general, but it was a much better fit for this particular API than flat C functions. It comes with a bunch of C++ helper classes to make it easy to work with, and the resulting code actually ends up looking OK.

[hctaw]

It seems odd to spend a bunch of time working on a C++ alternative for audio DSP but to rely on one of the most annoying C++ paradigms to deal with to embed it in anything useful. I don't really care how the library code looks (if the secret sauce is proprietary and closed source anyway, that presents zero value to me as a potential licensing customer!), I care how it functions.

I want to script together many soul patches into a complex systems written in higher level languages. Integrating C++ dependencies is avoided because of the headache of FFI, C is quite straightforward. I suspect users like myself will need to wrap your COM API in its C-equivalent through manually written vtables regardless, which is its own minefield rather than a proper API.

I hope it doesn't require the COM runtime...

[p0nce]

COM is relatively common and accepted in audio (VST3 / AAX). Usually it doesn't require the COM runtime from Win32, it's just an ABI for being able to virtually call and delete shared objects.

[pjmlp]

All modern Windows APIs since Vista are based on COM, so it isn't going away anytime soon.

As does macOS/iOS driver model.