[PD] Question about Data Structures and passing pointers around...

[Chuckk Hubbard]

On 10/3/06, Frank Barknecht <fbar at footils.org> wrote:
> Hallo,
> I have found that drawing a lot of data structures can have a bad
> effect on performance, but if you either close the [pd data] subpatch
> or if you use structures without graphical representations (yes,
> that's of course possible) you won't experience this.

I do this all the time, it is a lot faster.  I'm not sure, though, if
it is possible to have an array within a data structure without
plotting it?

> Another issue that has been reported in the past is a kind of
> corruption of the patch if you stored too much data inside the patch.
> It may happen, that Pd isn't able to open this patch anymore because
> it has to restore too much data in the data-window on startup.

That happened when I would store several one-period audio waveforms in
data structures, with 12000 samples each.  Since all of the
connections in the main patch were at the end, nothing would be
connected.  I'm pretty sure I've saved patches, though, with whole
audio files loaded in arrays and not had a problem.  Does this not
cause a problem with non-data-structure arrays?  It might also have
just been because the patch that gave me problems was far bigger on
its own than the others that didn't.