[oinj]

We use JUCE for building the app/plugin. It handles the GUI, the audio/MIDI devices and the plugin API. The synth engine was originally developed to run on a STM32F4 (what the Anyma Phi uses), so almost everything is purpose-built (with good old Makefiles). On the hardware, we use an immediate-mode UI and it's hard to go back to something like JUCE, which is flexible but a bit quirky. I often write GUIs with Cocoa for our internal tools (simulators, DSP models, etc) during the development of our hardware products and it's a much more comfortable environment.

In 2019 I had an early version of the Anyma engine running on Dear Imgui, it was really fun, but it would have required too much effort to properly manage audio/MIDI/plugin aspects in a cross-platform way, and the backends were incomplete at the time. JUCE was too much of a time saver to ignore for a team of 1.5.

I'm curious, if you don't use C++ and JUCE, what is your stack?

[pyinstallwoes]

Did you entertain choosing anything outside of juice?

[oinj]

We also investigated iPlug2, but ultimately decided on JUCE partly because it was easier to find help.