AW: [PD] freesym

Thomas Grill t.grill at gmx.net
Sat Apr 27 17:14:08 CEST 2002


I just experimented a bit...
In principle PD handles the lots of symbols quite well (i generated about
3000000 different ones), but naturally symbol retrieval becomes slow then.
In one occasion PD crashed but this seems to be attributable to Win2K (which
was non-responsive afterwards).
The size of the symbol hashtable is only 1024 by default, it should be
increased in cases with many symbols.

Btw. (as i now understand how gensym works...) it seems to be fairly easy to
include a function into pd that frees a symbol. The only difficulty is what
to do with the s_thing pointer attached to a symbol? Free its memory as well
or not?

greetings,
Thomas


> > >>And, on the other hand, is it possible to free symbol
> definitions from the
> > >>symbol space?
> > >>
> > >
> > > gensym("") +?
> >
> >could you explain?  "" is already there, in the first slot of the
> >hashtable.  It is generated in mess_init(), and used as a `null'
> >symbol referenced by `s_' (otherwise you seem to be right) --
>
> have not looked at pd very.                  may be.
>
> as recall pd. max. etc experience problems when too many symbols
> are generated.
> true +?





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