Using windows dlls in unix shared libraries

[Robert Jonsson]

Hi all,

I just subscribed to this list, I hope my questions aren't evidently 
answered elsewhere, I tried to do some homework browsing the docs and 
parts of the mailing list, but then again I'm no pro so I might have 
missed it.

The background story:
There is a plugin system for professional audio applications in Windows 
called VST. I suppose it does pretty much the same job as a multimedia 
codec. With the exception that they have internally generated GUIs! 
Perhaps a winamp plugin would be the closest match.
There is a similar format in Linux called LADSPA (www.ladspa.org).
Basically what I seek to do is try and wrap a VST plugin in a LADSPA plugin.

The question:
I don't know that much about Wine internals, but all the example 
applications I've looked at use the wine executable as boot loader. Does 
that mean that this is the only way to start a wine application?
The way I'd like to use it is like this:
Linuxhost (dlopen ladspaplug) - LADSPAplugin (LoadLibrary vstplugin) - 
VSTplugin

A possible solution would be to startup the VSTplugin in another 
application and do IPC between the LADSPAplugin and the 
VSTplugin-proxyhost.
Like this:
Linuxhost (dlopen ladspaplug) - LADSPAplugin <----ipc----> 
winebased_VSThost (LoadLibrary vstplugin) - VSTplugin
This does however seem akward... Is it possible to do it in an easier way?

Btw, I know about the avifile project, don't know the history but it is 
based on wine right? However, to my knowledge avifile supports only a 
very limited amount of API calls, ie no graphics/window calls (perhaps 
except some trivial ones). Which would probably make it pretty hard to 
implement the above...