maolan-engine

maolan-engine is the Rust audio engine that powers Maolan.

It provides:

• Audio and MIDI track processing
• Timeline-oriented recording and clip playback
• Track routing and plugin graph routing
• Offline bounce and export helpers
• Out-of-process (OOP) plugin hosting for CLAP, VST3, and LV2 (Unix) — each plugin runs in a separate OS process for crash isolation
• Platform audio backends for Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows (WASAPI)

Architecture

The engine uses a two-tier process model:

1. Main DAW process — hosts the UI, audio engine, and project state.
2. Plugin host processes — one per plugin instance, launched by the engine. Each host loads the plugin binary in-process and communicates with the DAW via shared-memory IPC (mmap on Unix, CreateFileMappingW on Windows) and lightweight cross-process events (pipe on Unix, named auto-reset events on Windows).

Plugins are never loaded directly into the DAW. If a plugin crashes, only its host process dies; the DAW detects the failure, bypasses the plugin, and continues playback.

Platform support

| Feature | Linux | FreeBSD | Windows | |---------|-------|-------|---------|---------| | Audio backend | ALSA, JACK | | ALSA, JACK | WASAPI | | CLAP hosting | ✅ OOP | ✅ OOP | ✅ OOP | ✅ OOP | | VST3 hosting | ✅ OOP | ✅ OOP | ✅ OOP | ✅ OOP | | LV2 hosting | ✅ OOP | ❌ | ✅ OOP | N/A | | GUI embedding | X11 | — | X11 | HWND (SetParent) |

This crate is under active development alongside the main Maolan application:

• Repository: https://github.com/maolan/maolan

Platform integrations depend on system libraries and host/plugin compatibility.