[PD] pdp/pidip on win32?

[John Harrison]

Are you sure Gem is more stable? From my last project I feel very burned 
by Gem. I started coding the visuals 100% in Gem and through much 
pulling of my own hair gradually ended up redoing the project in 
pdp/pidip.  The end result was stable (the Gem version wasn't --- 
multiple objects were crashing each individually tested and I had random 
freezes from different machines using Gem), looked a lot better, and 
used considerably less CPU resources. This was all in Linux.

And for me Gem also breaks many coding conventions of Pd.

I'm not trying to trash Gem. I have the utmost respect for its 
developers. I don't doubt it will be phenomenal with time and I wish to 
support its continued development. But I am hesitant to recommend it 
while it is in its current, perhaps unfinished, state. Example and test 
patches work fine but outside of that realm my experiences have not been 
positive. I have plans to document the problems I had and my thoughts 
about the coding conventions. It's possible I'm misunderstanding some 
things and/or maybe my concerns will help for future development.

In terms of the Windows port idea of pdp/pidip, it's just a way for 
people to play around at home. I'm not concerned about optimization 
which is why I mentioned cygwin as an option. The final show will be on 
Linux machines, no doubt.

I'd hate to move out of the Pd environment for video but that may be my 
next step if this doesn't work out. Maybe Processing...

-John

Derek Holzer wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> Well, I know what Yves' response to this will be ;-)
>
> At any rate, I'd suggest GEM over PDP anyways, you can do most of the 
> same things, it's truly cross-platform (i.e. has optimizations for 
> each different architecture/processor, rather than PDP which is 
> optimized for Linux + x86 only), it's much better documented and it's 
> much more stable. According to the PDP and PiDiP authors, neither 
> library will ever be ported to Windows.
>
> best!
> Derek
>
> John Harrison wrote:
>> Wondering if there has been any exploration of any of the pdp/pidip 
>> objects in win32 ---- maybe even through cygwin.
>>
>> Personal motivation: I'm teaching a class come mid-Jan where I'd like 
>> to incorporate pdp/pidip. Many of the students are on windows and it 
>> would be nice if they could do some development on their own machines.
>>
>> -John
>>
>

-- 
John Harrison
http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~harrison