AW: [PD] freesym

[Krzysztof Czaja]

hi Thomas,

Thomas Grill wrote:
 > 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

I am afraid Pd looses any possibility to do audio much sooner than
3e+06 figure might suggest.  On an 866Mhz linux, a simple patch using
[+ 1]<->[int]->`$1-nn' driven by [bang~]->`3'->[until] hits the
barrier at around 500000-nn symbol, both at first pass, and also
during retrieval.

 > 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?

This is usually a pointer to an object, and I do not think one is
supposed to simply ``free memory'' of an object...

Besides, I would generally be afraid of getting rid of a symbol,
which is bound to something, because this might indicate the symbol
is shared.  If symbol was to be freed, I would prefer s_thing
field to be null in the first place.  But your case may be special
(and I may be totally wrong here...)

Krzysztof