[PaulDavisThe1st]

I've previously written a long-ish article about the role of Lua/scripting in general in the context of a libre & open-source DAW before:

https://discourse.ardour.org/t/is-open-source-a-diversion-fr...

There's really no technological reason for not allowing Lua to create GUIs within Ardour. It's more a question of whether or not we actually want to. Either way, you would not be mixing GUI and realtime code - the architecture of Ardour doesn't allow that.

[diskzero]

Nice article Paul. It is motivating me to take another look at Ardour. I have also worked on some very large audio/video authoring tools. When we made the new lighting tools at Dreamworks, you could only create the UI using the scripting system. I am not sure if that discipline is still observed, but it was a good way to make sure that there wasn't a 2nd class citizen status given to extending the UI.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Thanks. Thing is, in an open source system, there are no 2nd class citizens caused by the "eat your own dogfood" rules (or lack thereof). You want to change the GUI in Ardour? The code is all right there.

The question I was raising (which I think you understand) is whether most users care that this is possible if it can't be done without a rebuild (compiling).

[diskzero]

Right. In the case of the studio tools, artists could extend the application but not touch the core. Much like Ardour, having to build the application from source was more complex and who wants to make their users do that?

[jacquesm]

I've been reading all of your comments in this thread and the links provided carefully, thank you for all the great work on Ardour and the degree of forethought that goes into it, it really shows in the final product.