Hi all,
as the LADSPA subsystem has been cleaned up and has been shown to also work on WIndows, I'm proposing to bundle the compile-time dependency (i.e. the ladspa.h header file) with FluidSynth and remove the compile-time switches and "#ifdef LADSPA" from the codebase.
LADSPA isn't actively developed anymore, the header file has been unchanged for a number of years. And quite a few other open-source projects also include the LADSPA header file in their codebase, for example Ardour and Audacity do that. Bundling it and removing the #ifdefs reduce complexity, both for developers and end-users.
LADSPA should still stay disabled by default, in which case the performance impact of this change would be two additional (if synth->ladspa_fx != NULL) for each rendered block. And the LADSPA subsystem only allocates memory when it is enabled. It will increase the size of the library a little bit, but I don't think that is realy a problem. We add new code to FluidSynth in other places as well.
As I see it, the only thing that might be a problem is the dependency on gmodule. When LADSPA is always compiled it, FluidSynth requires not only glib and gthread, but also the gmodule. But as all three libs are part of the glib distribution, that doesn't seem a huge problem to me.
So I would really like to get your feedback on this. Is there any reason not to bundle ladspa.h and always compiling it for all platforms?
Cheers,
Marcus