I think it all started with Delphi or Pascal... Which is why windows only... I would not be surprised if x1, x2 had some c#

IIRC Sonar stays away from the .NET libraries in favor of direct C++ calls to Win SDK/API and internal libraries. There is some C++ code available through Cakewalk's website that has source code written (I believe) by Greg Hendershott. It outlines how controllers communicate with the host.
 
With regard to EXE size I'm not sure it matters...all things being equal. If you are calling on #include libraries in straight C your executable will be larger but your execution should be (somewhat) faster as there should be no linking at run time.
 
Anywho, back to making music.
 
Regards,

The number of lines of code depends on the programmer.
C can be pretty obscure if you put everything on the same line, and I remember some people thinking this was a good idea.
 

Linear Phase

sharke
Yeah the language used is everything - I wrote a small app in Python for my business, and sometime later rewrote it in C (just for the hell of it). The C version was easily 10 times longer.

 
Interesting..   Just out of curiosity, did you write in Python3 or Python2.xxx... latest version or some other version

It was Python 2.x. I remember back at the time the buzz was all about the upcoming 3.x standard, but the general feeling was that it wasn't worth learning it yet. So I have no specific idea about the differences....as far as I know there were some quite significant syntax changes. I would highly recommend Python to anyone wanting to write anything that doesn't involve heavy processing (i.e. audio, graphics etc). It's one of the easiest and most intuitive languages to learn, and you can get something up and running insanely fast. And if you're looking to build a GUI there is a Python wrapper of wxWidgets, called wxPython.

Linear Phase

sharke
Yeah the language used is everything - I wrote a small app in Python for my business, and sometime later rewrote it in C (just for the hell of it). The C version was easily 10 times longer.

 
Interesting..   Just out of curiosity, did you write in Python3 or Python2.xxx... latest version or some other version

It was Python 2.x. I remember back at the time the buzz was all about the upcoming 3.x standard, but the general feeling was that it wasn't worth learning it yet. So I have no specific idea about the differences....as far as I know there were some quite significant syntax changes. I would highly recommend Python to anyone wanting to write anything that doesn't involve heavy processing (i.e. audio, graphics etc). It's one of the easiest and most intuitive languages to learn, and you can get something up and running insanely fast. And if you're looking to build a GUI there is a Python wrapper of wxWidgets, called wxPython.

Linear Phase

konradh
Many developers find it faster to solve issue by brute force than logic, and that makes sense if memory and storage are cheap. I still admire lean and elegant code, though.

 
That's a killer bit of wisdom right there..   So it is, that with proper algorithms the actual amount of tedious typing exponentially shrinks, while time spent with pen and yellow pad exponentially grow.
 
Cheers

Look at some of the video games written in the 80's. I remember playing absolutely huge 3D adventures complete with massive worlds and complex plots, all of which fit into 64K or less. Of course they were written in assembly language, but the coders back then (most of whom cut their teeth in their bedrooms) made sure not a single clock cycle was wasted. There are still coders like that around today - check out the 64K demo scene.  

I agree sharke, I remember when games would be massive and take a seriously long time to complete. That said graphics were not great but the game content was brilliant.

I write a lot of VB stuff for automating Excel spreadsheets, and I reckon my largest project is roughly 10K lines of code

I'm not sure what number of lines of code would tell you.
We know the company has been in business since 1987. At various times we even learn the number of employees.
 
CTO Noel Borthwick, who joined Cakewalk in 1999, talks about the application... 
http://www.noelborthwick.com/bio/index.php 
In this video from 2007, Noel and Carl Jacobson talk about modifying for multicore and x64 for Vista and Sonar 6.0 and adjustments for Least Privilege adjustments (not running as admin). The also talk about Windows Error Reporting and crash dumps. Noel talks about potentially changing their methods for instrumentation and methods for understanding why customers crash and how to convert that to actionable data.
 
Remember the production compilation may not include all the assertions and tests that are part of the code base. In other words, lots of instrumentation will be left out, so the size of the shipped code doesn't fairly represent all the code in the project.
 
Noel: "When you are writing something for a cause that you believe in, it makes a big difference."

Had to share this as an example of what a determined coder can fit into a small space: this entire video is from a 4k executable. That's right, 4 kilobytes.