[ardour-dev] we are not alone

[Paul Davis]

this is from the VP of Engineering at Cakewalk on vst-plugins:

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We've just finished tracking down a compatability issue between SONAR 4
and several plugins, and what we found may be of interest to the VST
developer community.  I hope some of you can use this information to
update your plugins to be more locale-aware.
 
The symptom of the problem was that on some systems, various plugins and
effects wouldn't produce any sound when patched into our application.
We determined that the common denominator was it only happened on
non-English Windows O/S.
 
Thanks to some help from folks at Arturia, we determined that these
plugins were parsing float values using the C runtime atof() function.
This parsing code stopped working in SONAR 4, because in SONAR 4 we
started calling setlocale() to configure the application to the current
user's language settings.  (This was a required change in our conversion
to Unicode.)
 
So in other words, if a user is running in a locale where the digit
separator is "," instead of ".", any code which parses parameter values
by using atof() could cause incorrect values to load.  If your plugin
code expects a "." as a decimal separator, then you need to call
setlocale() at runtime to ure this, because the host app may have set it
otherwise.
 
If you can, please check to see if your plugins are using atof() in this
way, assuming that "." is the decimal separator.  If so, you will need
to call setlocale() before calling atof() in order to be compatible with
SONAR 4.
 
In the meantime we have suggested the following as a workaround to our
users:
 
Bring up the "Regional and Language Options" page in the Windows Control
Panel, click on the [Customize...] button, and make the following
changes:=20
 
Decimal symbol: .=20
Digit grouping symbol: ,=20
List seperator: ,=20
 
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