[PD] [PD-dev] tkwidgets

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

That has little to do with Tcl/Tk being slow.  That has a lot more to  
do with how Pd is implemented.  It generates and sends raw Tcl to the  
GUI, and if you are moving a lot of stuff, that means a lot of raw Tcl  
needs to be generated, sent, parsed, and executed.  That definitely  
slows things down.  In my tests, I saw that moving a big patch around  
or animating a big array could send 1 megabyte of raw Tcl to the GUI  
per second.  Receiving, parsing, and executing 1 megabyte of code per  
second is actually pretty good, IMHO.

What needs to happen is that Pd should call Tcl procs not send blocks  
of raw Tcl.

.hc

On Aug 26, 2011, at 5:19 PM, João Pais wrote:

> tcl/tk behaves very slowly for fast calls, such as when dragging an  
> array of considerable size, or a big group of objects? afaik this is  
> something that could be improved in the present platform, but how  
> better could it be when using another gui framework?
>
>> It might be a good idea to list the problems with tcl/tk so we can  
>> weigh them against the difficulty of using a different GUI  
>> toolkit.  The problems I see are:
>> * difficult to implement a decent zoom function for a canvas
>> * can't display png without the Img library (included in 8.6)
>>
>> * can't do alpha transparency
>>
>>
>> Of the three I listed, I'm mostly interested in the first as it  
>> means that (without prior planning) it's hard to take a patch  
>> you've been working on at font size 10 and display it adequately  
>> over a projector, for example.  (If there's a work around I'd like  
>> to know it.)
>> I'd like to hear others, but I'm mostly interested in problems with  
>> tcl/tk >= 8.5 as the GUI.
>
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