We’re going to retire the live build functionality of the Projucer.
It’s not particularly clear from the outside, but the amount of effort required to keep things working across all the different versions of JUCE, and all the different sets of headers introduced with each operating system update, is really quite substantial. Whilst it was an interesting experiment when we had a dedicated LLVM engineer working for us, the cost of maintaining the functionality now easily outweighs the benefit, particularly with the introduction of Apple Silicon.
The live build hasn’t been in a good state for a few months, with a large cross-section of Windows and macOS versions not working correctly. Despite this, we have had remarkably few reports of any issues, so it’s unlikely that many people using JUCE are relying upon the live build functionality.
If the removal of the live build will really cause you problems please let us know. This will probably be part of the 6.1 release.
The upside of the live build’s removal is that we can simplify both the Projucer source code and our process for creating JUCE releases, so the latter can become more frequent.
I never really used it much myself, but I always found the concept highly interesting. As the live build engine is the only closed source part of the projucer, do you consider opening the sources after that step to allow the community to use it as a learning ressource and maybe even to allow further development as an open source project?
@jules Please consider throwing in your weight for open sourcing. Would be a shame if this fine piece of craftsmanship would turn into binary dust, neutrinos slowly picking at it, turning ones into zeros, zeros into ones - order into chaos, signal into noise, bit-rotten and forgotten. (read with dramatic voice)
IIRC the main reason for keeping it closed-source wasn’t to protect any kind of valuable IP or anything - it was just that it’s a total pain to build it with the correct version of LLVM on all the platforms. So by keeping it secret, we avoided having to support all the users who would struggle to get it to compile.
It does seem a reasonable request to have it become open-source, with the caveat that anyone using it doesn’t bother the team about it!
// These need to be public otherwise the Projucer's live-build engine will complain
class ColourSpaceView;
class HueSelectorComp;
class ColourPreviewComp;
