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
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.
that’s so cool! it looks good too. i might need your help in the future.
Google just killed flutter. Just so you know. They do that a lot. Be careful
Lol
(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 GTKthough 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.
IIRC, Qt comes with its own declarative language. That might be why you can’t find any bespoke ones.
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.
I recommend using qt for the interface, for audio use jack, it is better for music production, if you want to load vst plugins into the program, you can use yabridge
I’ve recently used dioxus with rust to build a native app with webview. Way cheaper than electron and the like.
Raylib sounds great. I would avoid gtk/qt. Enlightenment library also there but might not have zig bindings.
i recommend gtk’s libadwaita. it saves alot of time. It has JS Python rust and C bindings.
Bad idea. Very bad idea, especially for more complex projects.
You can try Kotlin Compose Multiplatform.
It can target JVM (windows, Linux, Mac) and then work on iOS and Android.
Android and JVM are stable. IOS is alpha and works well. Should be beta this year.
WASM support is coming as well but is experimental.
You can do as much multiplatform as you want and do as much platform specific as you want.
Compose itself is a declarative UI framework. Your UI is code.
Edit: You do require a Windows, Linux, and Mac machine to build the executables for each desktop JVM app, as well as a Mac for an iOS app. Android you can build on any of them.
