[PD] thoughts about iemlib

guenter geiger geiger at epy.co.at
Thu Sep 13 14:53:12 CEST 2001



On Tue, 11 Sep 2001, Miller Puckette wrote:
> No, I don't think color is CPU-expensive...  it's probably all those labels
> on the VU meters that are the real killers (the more stuff you have on the
> screen the more things TK has to check if it needs redrawing when sonething
> changes).

Actually the point I wanted to make is that tcl/tk *is* slow in doing
these things. If we get rid of that by using FLTK for example, we can
think of having several enhancements that are not possible with tcl/tk.
I am thinking of array drawing here, any kind of visual feedback that
helps the developer of the patches. This would definitely need some
changes within pd's basic structure too, like making lines real objects,
so one can distinguish signal and message connections, or support lines
with edges, ...

Make the gui objects more intelligent on the GUI side, and less
on the pd side.

If we have an abstraction for a "higher level" communication between the
GUI and pd, building new frontends would be easier. 

Readablility of patches is in my opinion one main problem of the language.
pd patches are harder to read than MAX or jMax patches.

Guenter 




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