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Interface Versions and Inheritance

Related pages:

• VST Module Architecture
• How to derive a class from an interface

Unlike C++ classes, VST-MA interfaces do not use inheritance to express specializations of objects. Usually all interfaces are derived from FUnknown. This is because interfaces must never change after they have been released. The VST Module Architecture Interfaces use inheritance only for versioning! All specializations will be modeled as separate interfaces!

For example the C++ classes:

class Shape
{
public:
    void setPosition (long x, long y);
protected:
    long x;
    long y;
};
class Rect : public Shape
{
public:
    void setDimension (long width, long height);
protected:
    long width;
    long height;
};

expressed in VST-MA, define an interface for each inheritance level:

class IShape : public FUnknown
{
public:
    virtual void setPosition (long x, long y) = 0;
};
class IRect : public FUnknown
{
public:
    virtual void setDimension (long width, long height) = 0;
};

In the next program version there need to be changes to the Shape class that look like this:

class Shape
{
public:
    void setPosition (long x, long y);
    void setColor (Color color);
protected:
    long x;
    long y;
    Color color;
};

The VST-MA representation now reflect the changes to Shape by adding a new interface that inherits from IShape and looks like the following code, while the former interface definitions remain the same:

class IShape2 : public IShape
{
public:
    virtual void setColor (Color color) = 0;
};