juce-best-practices

Memory allocations in the audio thread cause realtime safety violations and audio glitches. Pre-allocate all buffers and data structures in prepareToPlay before audio processing starts, ensuring processBlock performs only lock-free reads and writes without dynamic memory requests.

JUCE threading best practices enforce strict separation: audio thread handles only realtime-safe operations; message threads handle UI and state changes. Use lock-free structures like atomics for cross-thread communication and avoid locks, I/O, or blocking calls on the audio thread.

Clicks and dropouts typically result from unsafe realtime operations: allocations, mutex locks, or I/O on the audio thread. Run the realtime-safety checklist against processBlock to identify risky calls, then move them to prepareToPlay or use lock-free atomics for safe parameter updates.

Yes, modern C++ idioms improve JUCE code maintainability when applied correctly. Use move semantics, smart pointers, and template patterns for non-realtime code paths; reserve lock-free atomics and pre-allocated containers for audio-thread operations to maintain realtime safety.

Common errors include allocating or deallocating in processBlock, using standard containers with dynamic growth, and missing ownership semantics across threads. Follow pre-allocation in prepareToPlay and adopt modern C++ lifetime management to prevent leaks and undefined behavior.