It seems that Roli is always looking forward, so I feel it’s a good time to put a tiny stick in the wheel to look backwards to ask one silly question: what is the history behind JUCE?
This library has been around for however many years, stems from Tracktion, accomplishes a massive amount of native app things while specialising in audio, has been poked and prodded from however many directions, and had been maintained by one person for the longest time.
What’s the story? Where and why did it all start? And what about lessons learned so far maintaining a library?
@jules PLEASE! This would be so cool! I’d be extremely interested to learn about the iterations gone through to make JUCE into what it is today. API inspirations, how Tracktion got started, how JUCE was factored out and what the guts of Tracktion look like today as a result (since I consider Tracktion the true JUCE demo app), dealing with customers, fixing bugs found by licensees, etc.
There’s a lot to learn for all skill levels, and I can’t think of any other framework on the scale of JUCE which has been well-maintained mostly by a single person for so long.
That’s very flattering! I have done a couple of talks (I think to AES students) where I’ve given a potted history of it.
For ADC I have a less me-centric theme planned for my keynote, but maybe if people are interested I could fit in a lightning talk about this or something.
Ah, the fond memories of JUCE compiled as a static library.
Then the possibility to go amalgamated, and finally the jucequake in ver. 2.0 which produced what we known now as “JUCE modules”.
The binarybuilder and the Introjucer, the times of SVN when multiple changes where coalesced into single commits whose messages listed them all (because committing just parts of files was not possible).
I’ve been using JUCE since the times when AAX didn’t even exist, let alone a wrapper for it (we had to roll our own until an official one was included), and I must confess that the ride has been bumpy at times, smooth for the most part, but certainly worth to be told!
