[PD-dev] Re: flext installation - 2

[Thomas Grill]

> > Disadvantages:
> > - small processing and memory overhead
> > - size of externals (this will improve shortly)
>
> size of externals is not too bad in linux, especially when you link
> to Flext as a shared library.   But, I did notice that my externals are
> around 72k in linux, but up to 1MB under OS X (both were dynamically
> linked)

That's really strange... and i'm wondering why the OSX externals are that
big because the resulting size is more than the sum the object file sizes
including the flext library. I'll have to have time to read through the OSX
development docs, i guess.... probably flext should be a framework on OSX.

> however, one disadvantage I see in flext is that users of your external
> have to download YET ANOTHER piece of software to get yours to compile or
> work.  Would be great if Flext was distributed with PD per default as a
> C++ interface.

I'd certainly be glad if this were the case. However, things to sort out
before are
- make shared flext a standard for all platforms, including a foolproof
versioning system
- have a few patches to PD (already in the devel branch) included into the
Miller version, namely
-- array time stamping
-- portable stack checking
- check whether data structures can be properly handled with flext

Apart from that i think flext is quite stable

best greetings,
Thomas