[PD] c++ wrappers

[Larry Troxler]

Juha Vehviläinen wrote:
> 
> dear list, Miller,
> 
> how about general c++ wrappers for making writing externals
> more clear and simple? Gem (or gemPlus?) seems to have this
> approach, I wonder if others have thought of it. Are there
> efficiency issues?
> 
> juha

I've often thought of this, but never spent enough time to conjure up a
good framework.
I think it would be tricky to do this, while interfacing to the
C-language PD.

For the first time today, I took a quick look at the Gem approach, but
I'd have to look at it in a lot more detail to see whether it would work
in general. I think that Mark had said once during a similar discussion
on this list, that his classes where pretty much specific to the needs
of Gem.

On my first reading of the Gem approach, I have to say that the macro
approach used seems pretty ugly - it seems you have to define a macro
for every combination of creation arguments that the object could have.
But again, I haven't looked at it in detail. Also, I don't beleive that
Gem deals at all with DSP processes. 

Again, I don't know if I could do any better. I think a good C++
framework at the very least would have to employ some tricky template
magic.

Certainly, if you have any ideas about how to implement such a thing,
I'm sure that people on this list would be very interested and maybe we
could come up with something. 

You mention a concern about efficiency issues. I am quite sure that this
would not be a concern. No, I think the biggest problem is how to
interface a set of class heirarchies to the PD code.

Again, I have thought several times about this, and my mind got a little
overwhelmed. 

Larry