Floe is a CLAP, VST3 and AU plugin for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It loads and plays sample libraries in the Floe format. Visit floe.audio for more information about the project.
See also our roadmap section on our website, and our FAQ document.
This project is licensed under GPL version 3 or later. See the LICENCES folder for the full licence text. We follow the REUSE recommendations for this repository.
- Download Zig 0.14.0
- Clone this repository
- Run
zig build installin the root of the project - Binaries are created in the
zig-outdirectory
We typically use our Nix development environment on Linux or macOS to build Floe, and cross-compile to Windows. Enter this environment by installing Nix, enabling Nix flakes, and running nix develop in the root of the project. This ensures the correct Zig version and all dependencies are available. However, the Nix environment is not often necessary.
Run zig build --help to see more options.
To build an optimised release binaries, do something like zig build install -Dbuild-mode=production. You can also use Zig's standard --prefix option to specify an installation directory. We have configured this so that it will install audio plugins to the standard subfolders on each platform. On Linux, set the prefix to your home directory, on macOS set it to ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins, and on Windows set it to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Common. Alternatively, omit the --prefix option and copy the binaries from the zig-out directory manually to wherever you need them.
We support cross-compiling using the -Dtargets= option. So for example you can compile the Windows and macOS plugins on a Linux machine. Valid targets are x86_64-windows, x86_64-linux, x86_64-macos and aarch64-macos. You can specify multiple targets separated by commas. Note that we don't support cross-compiling to Linux from any OS; you need to be on Linux to build Linux binaries at the moment.
Building on Linux, you will need libraries for curl, x11, OpenGL and GLX (handled automatically in the Nix environment); these are also normally installed by default on your distro. Runtime dependencies are xdg-open and zenity.
Run zig build test to run the unit tests. Add arguments after -- to configure our test runner's command-line options. We also have easy to use testing using pluginval, vst3-validator, clap-validator, valgrind, thread sanitizer, clang-tidy; see zig build --help.
Rather than use bash for miscellaneous development scripts, we use Zig. The scripts.zig file is automatically compiles and then is run via the CLI. See zig build --help for a list of available scripts.
Floe is written in C++ and we use Zig for the build system. Eventually, we're considering using Zig for the entire codebase.
We strive for handcrafted, detail-focused, performant code. The goal is to sustainably maintain a long-term codebase that is a joy to work on and results in a reliable, fast, professional product. With that in mind, we chose not to use any framework; just a handful of third-party libraries for specific tasks. We also don't use the C++ standard library, and only sparingly use the C standard library. Instead, we take a hands-on approach to as much as possible: memory management, data structure design and error handling. We have full control to tailor the code to our detail-focused design.
Good developer tools is a priority. Our build system supports clangd by emitting a compile_commands.json file. Additionally, we have good support for stacktraces, valgrind, clang-tidy, clang-format, cppcheck, etc. And because we use only Zig for the build system, we can cross-compile to other platforms and we can wholeheartedly use Clang-specific language extensions and features from the latest C++ language standards.
Thorough continuous testing and deployment is also a priority. We want to provide frequent backwards-compatible updates, and so need a way to ensure we don't break anything.
Some parts of the codebase need some love (I'm looking at you GUI and audio processing). We're working on it.
Floe's website is in the website folder and it's built with Docusaurus. We have 2 release channels: stable and beta. We use Docusaurus' versioning feature to maintain separate documentation for each channel. website/docs contains the beta documentation, and website/versioned_docs/version-stable contains the stable documentation. We use the command zig build script:website-promote-beta-to-stable to promote the beta website to stable.
Feel free to use the discussions on GitHub for questions, feedback, and ideas. Report bugs to the Github issue tracker. Also, FrozenPlain has a Floe section on their forum.
