I advise you to give each of them a quick try to get a feel for how they work for you. Ultimately if you are writing your own C++ DSP code then the limitation for that is with you. iPlug 2 would certainly allow you to do that.
iPlug 2 is designed with a few things in mind - firstly so that you write minimal code to get your plugin up and running - and certainly to start with you can concentrate on DSP and parameters only (that is something that was the case also in iPlug 1). The second relevant item is iPlug2 is *very* different to iPlug 1 in terms of graphics - full vector graphics support and a concentration on speed (depending on what backend you choose).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xenakios
Easy graphics isn't going to happen with IPlug or Juce. You will be spending the bulk of your development time dealing with GUI issues. IPlug doesn't have that many ready to use GUI controls.....
-IPlug. The old IPlug is as far as I know deprecated and IPlug2 isn't yet "production ready". ... May require quite a lot of work to get a GUI on screen. (This was the case with at least the old IPlug, there wasn't even ready to use slider or knob controls, you needed to get bitmaps from somewhere to get the slider or knob on the screen.)
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I'd like to point out several things here. There is no need to spend most of your time on GUI - that will depend on your plugin -you can even use the host provided egg-slider GUI without writing any code. iPlug 2 also has quite a few provided vector controls - you no longer have to use bitmaps. Xenakios - it doesn't sound like you've tried out iPlug 2 but hopefully you'll find things are quite a bit different now.
Ultimately these three things are trying to provide different things. JUCE comes with a lot of stuff, but with that you get a lot of DSP libraries (and other kinds of libraries) that you might have no useful and a whole ecosystem to deal with - on the other hand you can build complex apps with it. I have no experience of RackAfx expect reading about it, but some differences have been pointed out here. iPlug 2 aims to be relatively lightweight, permissively licensed and deploys to a wide range of options (including WAMS or web audio modules).
It's impossible to say which one will fit you best. JUCE or iPlug will let you write all your own DSP code and that should run the same in either. If you need lots of DSP library bits JUCE has more. If you want something that just makes the plugin side of things easier then iPlug 2 is worth considering. You can just clone the GitHub repo and try compiling the examples.
Alex (full disclosure - one of the devs on iPlug 2)