[PD] Pd standalone instruments ...

Chuckk Hubbard badmuthahubbard at gmail.com
Wed Jul 26 23:19:13 CEST 2006


On 7/26/06, Martin Peach <martin.peach at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> padawan12 wrote:
> >
> > I see a free software tool that does what Pd does
> > and outputs code as an inevitability, sooner or later, it's just the logical
> > thing to do. It's just that I'm rather scratching my head wondering why it doesn't
> > do so already. Perhaps I've forgotten some fundamental reason why exploding the netlist
> > into a code listing might not be trivial, reenterancy maybe,
> Well possibly the fact that most pd patches are not strictly procedural,
> a list of instructions that is run through once. Messages can arrive at
> any time to modify what is going on...
> PD is already written in C and is basically a scheduler that calls
> functions at the appropriate times based on the messages the functions
> are emitting. It seems to me you can't get any further than that in C.
> Sure you can manually write any particular patch more efficiently as a
> standalone program but I doubt there is a general way to do that since
> there is no way to predict every possible state of every possible patch,
> hence no way to guarantee that a program is really the same as the
> original patch.
> IMHO,
> Martin

Does Pd actually replace the objects in a patch with their machine code?
It seems like, if the behavior of the program and the behavior of any
one object are derived from C code, you could just plug the necessary
pieces of C code together in the same relationships as the objects in
the patch.  I don't think the extra step of then compiling the C code
would be much of a PITA for anyone using Pd.  If you really wanted a
small program, you could even take out parts of objects you don't
need, if that doesn't violate anyone's license.  As in, if you have no
[/~] objects, take that section out of the signal math file.  Kind of
the way Csound works.
Maybe it wouldn't be much benefit for existing Pd users, but I bet it
would draw new users in.  Then again, I realize it wasn't part of the
original vision behind Pd; but that needn't stop it.




More information about the Pd-list mailing list