Re: First deprecate APIs and then remove them in the next major version

[Christian Schoenebeck <schoenebeck linuxsampler org>]

On Sonntag, 24. Dezember 2017 10:26:48 CET Paul Davis wrote:
> > The trend among DAW apps is going towards process separation for plugins
> > (one
> > process for all instances of a plugin). No plans for that in Ardour yet?
>
> ​It doesn't scale. ​Certainly not to the session size that we're interested
> in being able to deal with.

Well, I know the old opinion about this issue. In practice one process per 
plugin actually scales quite well on modern hardware. Even if you might have a 
very large amount of plugin instances, usually these are just instances of 
some very few plugins in your project though.

In the end you can still make this behavior configurable per plugin. So you 
might setup your DAW project to use certain plugins in-process (i.e. various 
insert effects) and certain complex / problematic plugins (i.e. virtual 
instruments and master effects) process separated.

On the mid/long term I am pretty sure all DAW apps will be going this way.

On Sonntag, 24. Dezember 2017 16:24:28 CET Robin Gareus wrote:
> Process-separation requires a context-switch which is very expensive and
> does not scale [1]. There are no plans to add this to Ardour.

Yes, I am aware about the context switch of course.

The point here is that you don't necessarily need a context switch for each 
track, or even for each individual plugin instance applied to a track. So the 
math outlined on that maling list reference is quite pessimistic. Depending on 
your precise DAW project setup/routing you might even be fine with only two 
context switches per audio cycle for all instances of one specific plugin.

Anyway, I was just curious what Ardour's plans were about this issue. I'm out 
now. Merry Xmas holidays everyone!

CU
Christian