[PD-dev] capabilities of data structures with externals

[x nor]

This past week I've finally learned a bit more about data structures in PD
and I've successfully created my own data structures that model data from
ATS files (sines + noise analysis models).
The re-synthesis ended up being a bit heavy because I didn't see a way to
use tabread~/tabread4~ directly with arrays of complex data, so I patched
some helpers that iterate the data structures and create float arrays from
the fields as needed.

I'm wondering if I can replace this with an external that deals with these
details internally so I have a few questions before I go down that road:

1) I see that I can register "pointer" methods for externals.. my structure
has a field that stores an array that stores arrays of structs, can I
expect to be able to get to that data in an external? Any examples?
2) If I am able to get to the data, can I mark it as 'used for dsp' somehow
like i see you can do for garrays, and then use it within a dsp callback
'safely' or do i need to copy the data into separate float arrays to do
that?.. maybe i should reorganize the data so that I don't have to do the
copy, but if I end up creating a bunch of float arrays to model the data
inside my data structure, can I then somehow treat it as a "garray" and
mark it used in dsp and use it in my dsp method?

Thanks,
Alex
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