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

Hans-Christoph Steiner hans at at.or.at
Mon Oct 3 16:35:46 CEST 2011


On Oct 3, 2011, at 8:28 AM, katja wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 11:36 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner  
> <hans at at.or.at> wrote:
>
>> I think it makes sense to work off of
>> pure-data.git rather than pd-extended.git since this is a patch  
>> targetted at
>> getting into Miller's repo.
>
> Right. Even then, we could add some external libs to work on, starting
> with zexy and cyclone for example. The question is how to load
> appropriate executables into local single and double precision test
> builds of vanilla Pd. A single preference file is shared by all
> vanilla Pd installations, therefore setting searchpaths via
> preferences is no option. Each Pd should only load from it's own
> 'extra' directory. With the extra's included in vanilla Pd, this works
> fine as far as I have seen. I tested bonk~ in single and double
> precision Pd simultaneously without symbol collision.

I think we can pretty rapidly get a double-precision Pd-extended  
nightly build working, its just that a lot of external objects will be  
crashy since they use float rather than t_float.  I just checked a  
couple, and they look good in terms of using t_float appropriately.


>> As for arch issues, I think Intel and ARM are the big ones to test  
>> these
>> days.  But PPC is fine too.
>
> Expressed in number of 'users', ARM is probably the most popular
> target hardware for Pd at the moment. It should be easy to patch libpd
> with the same .patch files, or not? Some modified files are inexistent
> in libpd (s_audio_pa.c, vexpr.c etc). It's important to at least
> benchmark-test rewritten code on this hardware indeed, if we want to
> make a unified doube-precision-ready Pd happen.


In terms of development, let's stick with one codebase.  I'll make our  
jobs easier.  Its also easy to compile pure-data.git for ARM, and  
indeed the 'puredata' package is included in Debian/ARM.  Do you have  
access to an ARM machine?  If not, I could probably get one online  
with ssh access, if that's useful.

.hc

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