[PD-dev] double precision Pd: .patch files, tests and benchmarks

[katja]

Hi Hans,

Thanks for your detailed comments. I will go through the code once
again, you're right it's not as clean as could be.

Regarding your suggestion to set up a repo, it seems to be the most
logical thing to do. This could be considered a temporary branch for
the double precision thing, to be discontinued once all the code works
fine for single and double precision alike and merged into Pd. I'll
start that up one of these days (my first repo ever, hope to get it
done...).

A few words on the scope of tests done so far. Rewritten code was
developed and tested on Intel core CPU's, where it seems to work
smooth, both with SSE and FPU instructions. Regarding functionality
and robustness, I have good confidence that it will work anywhere, as
it's simple and depends only on standard libs. But considering
performance, more checking is needed. The rewritten phase-wrapping
classes have branches in the perform-loops. These are only executed in
rare cases, therefore branch prediction mechanisms can do their good
work. But on older architectures branching may be more expensive. That
was also the reason for Miller's branchless design of these classes,
of course. PPC in particular should be considered, as there are still
quite a few users. Maybe the code needs some finetuning to PPC. Only
after settling this aspect, I would consider submitting the
double-precision-ready .patch file for Pd's core code. Otherwise I'd
risk an endless series of amendements on a submitted patch. In the
meantime, double precision ready code would be available from this git
repo we're planning.

Katja