[PD] max for live

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Jan 19, 2009, at 9:21 AM, Damian Stewart wrote:

> Daniel Almeida wrote:
>> I dare say PD needs to ditch tcl/tk! SDL could be a good idea.
>>
>> Daniel
>
> yeah that's what i said about two years ago...
>
> the problem is, at the moment tcl/tk is embedded quite deeply into Pd
> itself. this is a focus of the current pd-dev effort: trying to  
> clear this
> up. tcl/tk in itself isn't _necessarily_ slow, it's just that the  
> way Pd is
> using it is not at all optimised (for example, as Hans-Christoph and i
> discovered once, when you click-drag to move an element in a graphical
> table, not just the element you moved but _the entire table_ is  
> redrawn,
> each time).
>
> -- 
> damian stewart | skype: damiansnz | damian at frey.co.nz
> frey | live art with machines | http://www.frey.co.nz


It's slight worse, even.  The entire table is deleted and re-created  
on each change, not even just redrawn.  That said, I am guessing the C+ 
+ code on the GPU (Live) will always be quite a bit faster than Tcl/Tk  
on the CPU.  One of the ways that Live is able to make things fast is  
by ignoring the native widgets on each platform and coding their own.   
Tcl/Tk is the best GUI toolkit I've seen for making native-feeling  
apps while writing cross-platform code.

If Live is really just blasting bitmaps to the screen, that is  
something that Tcl/Tk can easily do.  But I am not sure that it would  
be the fastest way to implement GUI widgets.

If someone wants to help this situation, I think the best thing to do  
would be to create some GUI objects using TkZinc.  Then we'll have Tcl/ 
Tk on the GPU and that should make things quite a bit faster.

.hc


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