greetings, i want to build a daw (digital audio workstation), but i have no idea where to even start. here are my needs and the options i’ve found:
my needs:
- load and keep things (audio, midi) in memory
- cross-platform compatibility is not a requirement
the options i’ve found:
fluttergtk/qt- raylib (with zig)
webassembly (with zig)
[rejected] flutter: the first option that came to my mind was flutter. i thought it would give me a quick start in laying down the ui, but i don’t think it has the capability to fulfill my needs (please correct me if i’m wrong)
gtk/qt (with zig): i wonder if qt provide bindings for zig
raylib (with zig): it’s cool (my choice as of now)
[rejected] webassembly (with zig): it would be an ultimate comfort to build this way ig, but is it possible to make that web app into desktop one (like tauri or something)?
id really appreciate your opinions and advice
ps: i hope i’m clear. i got a headache searching about these. i’ll update this post for more clarity later
final note
Thank you guys for all your opinions and advises. Thanks for explaining the limitations with gtk, things with qt and flutter. That kotlin compose thing was cool too. Thanks for mentioning yabridge thats gonna be helpful. It might not seem like it, but I did listen to your thoughts, and stuck with zig and raylib. Thanks a lot
QT is a cross platform UI development framework, its goal is to look native to the platform it operates on. This video by a linux maintainer from 2014 explains its benefits over GTK, its a fun video and I don’t think the issues have really changed.
Most GTK advocates will argue QT is developed by Trolltech and isn’t GPL licensed so could go closed source! This argument seems to ignore open source projects use the Open Source releases of QT and if Trolltech did close source then the last open source would be maintained (much like GTK).
Personally I would avoid Flutter on the grounds its a Google owned library and Google have the attention span of a toddler.
Not helping that assessment is Google let go of the Fuschia team (which Flutter was being developed for) and seems to have let go a lot of Flutter developers.
Personally I hate web frontends as local applications. They integrate poorly on the desktop and often the JS engine has weird memory leaks
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I’ve started building a lightweight daw mostly for mixing songs together rather than any actual serious music production. Currently only supports volume and bass envelopes, and dragging tracks around. I’m planning to open source it when it’s a bit more polished. It’s written in rust and I’m using egui for the frontend.
Google just killed flutter. Just so you know. They do that a lot. Be careful
(Google recently laid off parts of the Flutter team)
and Raylib has a LOT of bindings (ie. not just Zig)
I want to use Raylib, but mentioning it here on the fediverse doesn’t get much of a response (I can’t see a raylib community from my instance). My choice of language probably doesn’t help, though.
My first issue is wanting vertex colors on 3D models and I am not getting this (this may be a problem with the bindings I’m using, naylib(nim-lang)). The second would be needing guidance for the 2D polygon text loader that I started.
Maybe I could make simple GUI applications with raygui, but I don’t currently really have many viable ideas on what I would want to make.
To OP: Another potential option is using Godot w/bindings. Design is pretty fast and flexible, then using signals is super easy.
I’ve tested some frameworks (specific to my language, so not really helpful to most), the one that I liked more said it was declarative user interface framework based on GTK though I would prefer a similar thing for Qt and there wasn’t an ability to automatically scale text size to better fill the available button size (I was testing an adventure-book reader and hoping to use unicode characters).
Frameworks for single page applications (or some other browser-based tech) might be ok for simple stuff. Similarly, I’ve liked the idea of TUI frameworks (yeah, because htop) but haven’t really tried that yet.
It depends if you’re using Gnome or KDE. If you prefer KDE, use Qt. If you prefer Gnome’s interface ideas (that looks quite different), use GTK+ with libadwaita. GTK+ has good bindings for Python, and Rust, and a new, rather Gnome-specific language, Vala.
