lots of crap in this thread...

there is absolutely no reason in the world why a virus cannot run as a plugin on a modern machine albeit converters DO play an important part. if the developers were prepared to program a native plugin, it would be a massive job to convert the code which is also why we won't see some things like some soundtoys TDM plugs native because of the work involved - reported by soundtoys themselves

it's actually a MUCH bigger pain to code for DSP than for native and then also a huge pain to port

i'm now also against the idea of buying any hardware accelerated plugins after being burned by TC Electronic - i made huge investments into Powercore...
thankfully softube made a native version of CL1b and the native version is improved as it's not contrained by the 24bit DSP limitations either...

one major difference between the likes of Access Hardware and Native Plugins is the resources used to code it. Access is a big company making good money selling hardware...there's a lot of money in hardware - look at apple

now look at sylenth1 - this is a one man show that spent i think it was 18month developing the plugin. now put a 5 man team in to develop a plugin for 18months and see what comes out!