Building both floats and doubles

I've been thinking about changing the csound Debian packaging to
support both 32 and 64 bit builds. There is, however, one major
problem. While the csound library itself has a different name for each
version, allowing both to be installed at the same time, none of the
other libraries do. Plugins could be easily configured to install on
separate paths and define appropriate OPCODEDIR/OPCODE64DIR. However,
the interface libraries do not encode the floating point size in their
names, thus making it impossible to install both at the same time.
libcsnd.so would need to be renamed, and lua/python/java bindings
would have to conflict with each other (because there is no meaningful
way in which this can be done without renaming the module, and I think
it doesn't make much sense to have both). Alternatively, I could allow
the csound library to be both sizes, but only allow a single version
of libcsnd.so (and thus, all the bindings).
The second option is clearly suboptimal, but it is simpler, and is
better than the current situation (although, inside debian, nobody
uses libcsound yet, and the only prospective package I know of is
qutecsound, which wouldn't benefit since it uses libcsnd.so). However,
just supporting different versions of the same executable at the same
time is a significant pain, and I won't do it unless somebody shows me
it has some clear advantages.
The first option is technically superior, but it would mean breaking
existing users of libcsnd.so (how many of these are out there?
qutecsound and CsoundAC are the only ones that I am aware of). Users
of python/lua/java interfaces will not have a problem because those
wrappers would be changed at the same time as csound. I think the
safest way to do this (if there is need to) is to just change the name
and (unfortunately) requiring applications to change if they want to
use the 64bit version.

Do you people think it is worth it? I only use doubles version, but
apparently some people have uses for floats due to its perceived
performance benefit (which may not always exist, as we've seen). And
by worth it, I mean breaking every user of the csnd C++ wrapper.
Developers, do you think this increase in complexity is worthwile? I
ask because I remember some talk about just dropping floats a while
ago.


Saludos,
Felipe Sateler

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