[PD] Zen Garden re-implementing the wheel in C++?

[Spencer Russell]

On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 1:38 AM, Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca> wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Apr 2010, Spencer Russell wrote:
>
>> I'm excited about the idea of a more object-oriented approach,
>
> Pd's implementation was made with an object-oriented approach. You can't get
> much more object-oriented than that. If you mean that the object-oriented
> approach has been implemented using C++'s grammar instead of having to
> invent yet another object system in C, you are right, and that can be a
> relief. However, this does not guarantee anything at all on the outcome of
> the project.
>

Agreed that Pd's code is certainly organized in an object-oriented
way, and the architecture that Miller has constructed to do OOP in C
is extremely clever and definitely nothing to throw sticks at. On the
other hand, there are structures that come for free when using a
language that supports real objects out of the box (such as real
polymorphism) that are difficult if not impossible to achieve in C.

> Much of ZenGarden is designed by copy+paste, and that's something that it
> doesn't get any better than Pd.
>
> Meanwhile, the author claims ZenGarden has « clean code », presumably to
> imply that Miller's isn't, but there's no explanation at all on what it
> means to be clean. I think cleanliness means no copy paste. I also think
> cleanliness doesn't mean using variable-names that look like
> this_is_the_array_that_contains_the_outlets_sorted_by_horizontal_position.

I'm not ready to make blanket statements regarding the overall
cleanliness of ZG vs. PD code, but there's definitely a significant
reduction of boilerplate necessary to create an object, which seems
like a step forward. I have some concerns about the extensibility of
some of ZG's current architecture (the PdGraph object has a list of
all the objects it supports hard-coded in), but it's still a young
project with the architecture still somewhat in flux.

>
> Then the externals API... I don't think that was compatible with anything.
> It's a lot easier to port your Pd externals to MAX than to ZenGarden.

agreed, losing the rich library of Pd externals would be a huge
problem, and developing a flext-like abstraction layer seems
intractable due to the significant under-the-hood differences.

It also seems important to note that the ZG guys aren't trying to
replace PD wholesale, but just to provide a separate runtime library
that makes Pd patches more embeddable (within other programs, on other
devices). The project was started by RJDJ, so I don't imagine that
dynamic patching is a high priority.

-s