[PD] abstraction penalty benchmarks

[Miller Puckette]

> 
> Hi Miller,
> 
> Just very generally BTW:
> Do you mean binary compatibility or patch compatibility?
> Either way, what are your thoughts about the possibility of a future Pd-1.0
> which would break (some kind of) compatibility for the sake of
> revolutionary progress?
> 
> András

I'm unwilling to break either patch or binary compatibility - Pd's original
purpose is for interactive music and art and there is a big repertory now
depending on Pd to remain runnable.

I'm willing to make minor compatibility changes protected by compatibility
switches.  Pd now maintains a global compatibility version number to try
to facilitate this.  (It was necessitated by two bugs in DSP objects, one
rather serious, that I wanted to fix without breaking old patches that 
might depend on the buggy behavior.)

On a side note, the reason I'm so slow to add fetures to Pd is that I want
to be sure that everything I do is something I'm willing to maintain for
as long as I can.

cheers
Miller