[PD-dev] message passing

[Krzysztof Czaja]

hi Orm,

Orm Finnendahl wrote:
...
 > I don't really understand, what you're asking. Shall we do experiments
 > on our own and share the results?

not if you trust my results :)

Actually I do not trust them either, because there are just too
many things to account for in designing the tests.  The outcome is
quite obvious:  allocating in each call is expensive.  But how
expensive, and does it really matter in practice?  After doing
the maths I found out that 1) the average cost of one
getbytes/freebytes pair is somewhere around memcpying of 120
atoms, and 2) I do not know what this really means.

Perhaps this is all a matter of taste?  So I simply need some
guidance from people more experienced than myself, and with
a better taste than mine.

Anyway, I tried to explain what I am up to in my first post:

 > I am asking this in the context of porting max classes to Pd.
 > I suspect, that most of the originals use method no 1.

In many cases, the only trouble in porting a max class to Pd is
to answer the very same question I am asking in this thread.

It is about:  ``choose the best way now, then reuse'' vs.
``make ad hoc decision each time there is some spare time to spend
coding next class''...

Krzysztof