[PD] Any useless/fun gui plugins around?

[Mathieu Bouchard]

Le 2011-12-02 à 03:44:00, Dan Wilcox a écrit :

> I was showing a friend the new pd gui plugins and he suggested one that 
> causes the patch wires to vibrate/wiggle based on the amount of messages 
> being sent. How hard would it be to code such a plugin?

You need modifications in the centre of the interpreter of pd to first 
have a trace of all the messages. This will necessarily need recompiling 
pd.

For plain users who want this already compiled, they'd need some kind of 
way to pick the correct executable at startup : choose either the regular 
«fast» interpreter (well, at least faster than the other) or the 
interpreter that constantly reports to a special kind of plugin (checking 
whether any such plugins are active still slows down the interpreter).

The 2nd interpreter allows for a plugin that counts the number of messages 
or total size of messages, or a plugin that prints all messages to a file, 
or print backtraces for every error message, and perhaps a lot of other 
things (though probably not a stepping-debugger, for example... you can't 
be pausing pd while still clicking around).

BTW, Pd has already two interpreters... I'm talking about two possible 
variants of the message-interpreter, because you are talking about 
messages, but there is also a signal-interpreter, which would have to be 
modified if you also wanted runtime stats on that.

There may be other ways of doing similar things using tricks like making 
invisible patchcords to hidden objects that aren't even in the patch, but 
to me it doesn't sound any easier than modifying the centre of the 
message-interpreter (m_class.c and stuff).

What does the patchcord inspector do, to get its data ? I didn't look at 
it.

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| Mathieu BOUCHARD ----- téléphone : +1.514.383.3801 ----- Montréal, QC