// the find
olilarkin/wdl-ol
Enhanced version of Cockos' iPlug - A simple-to-use C++ framework for developing cross platform audio plugins and targeting multiple plugin APIs with the same code. VST / VST3 / Audiounit / RTAS / AAX (Native) formats supported. NOTE: THIS IS OBSOLETE, PLEASE SEE IPLUG2:
WDL-OL is an archived fork of Cockos' IPlug C++ framework for building VST/VST3/AU/RTAS/AAX audio plugins from a single codebase. The author himself says to go use IPlug2 instead — this repo hasn't been touched since 2021 and is explicitly obsolete. Only reason to look at it is archaeological interest or maintaining a plugin that was already built on it.
- Covers a wide format surface in one abstraction: VST2, VST3, AudioUnit, RTAS, AAX, and standalone apps — targeting all of these from a single plugin class was genuinely useful before IPlug2 existed
- Ships with a solid set of example projects (gain, synth, convolution, sidechain, OpenGL, EEL scripting) that actually demonstrate non-trivial use cases, not just hello-world
- Bundles WDL's EEL2 scripting engine, a JIT-compiled expression language used in REAPER — that's a unique capability you don't see in most plugin frameworks
- Includes production-ready installer scripts and distribution tooling alongside the plugin code, which most frameworks leave as an exercise for the reader
- Archived and officially obsolete — the maintainer's README literally points you to IPlug2; starting a new plugin on this in 2024 would be a mistake
- RTAS support means Pro Tools 9-era compatibility code is in the tree; that SDK is long dead and the presence of this cruft signals the codebase wasn't kept clean
- No CMake or modern build system — you get MSVC project files and Xcode projects, which means keeping them in sync as you add files is manual and error-prone
- Carbon-based macOS graphics path (IGraphicsCarbon.cpp) reveals just how old some of this is; Carbon was deprecated by Apple over a decade ago and removed entirely in 64-bit macOS