[PD-dev] pointers

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Sun, 8 Jul 2007, Charles Henry wrote:

> I think I understand now.  You pass pointers to structures.  That makes 
> a lot of sense.

Actually, GridFlow's struct GridOutlet it's more like a C++ object class, 
which isn't much different from a C struct, especially as that class 
doesn't have any virtuals in it. (It has method templates though)

> So to flatten the tree for passing, only to be un-flattened afterwards 
> is less efficient than to pass a pointer to the tree.

Yeah, that was what happened when we were wrapping LTI (Aachen 
university's image library). We were ok to do it for cases where it was 
merely slowing down because then it allowed better integration with 
existing GridFlow features, but were thinking about on-demand conversion 
to get the best of both worlds (speed and flexibility) and then for at 
least one case, the data wasn't really amenable to be processed by 
GridFlow, so we left it as in and used pointers to non-Grids (I'm not 
going to tell you how we did it, because you shouldn't be imitating that 
solution! it's even crazier)

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal QC Canada