- +

THE PROBLEM WITH X WINDOW

• X Window is a low-level drawing abstraction
• other software layers called "toolkits" made it easier to write software (GTK+, Qt, FLTK, etc)
• very difficult to use 2 toolkits in the same process
• normally, nobody wants to do that but ...

most interesting plugins tend to be tightly coupled UI+DSP code

• if plugin uses toolkit A and the "host" uses toolkit B, stuff just won't work

So ...

• JACK makes it possible to run plugins in another process
• benefits:
  • isolates host from plugin errors
  • avoids requirement for IPC between UI+DSP code
  • developers can choose their own GUI toolkits

But ...

• now we face context switch overhead when we run plugins