[PD] abstraction penalty benchmarks

[Claude Heiland-Allen]

Hi,

I looked at accelerating* pd_unbind(), but it seems impossible without
breaking binary compatibility somewhere along the line.  There's simply
no space to store any implementation-private data in objects, as an
object is just a pointer to a class.

*by making a parallel bindlist per object that points to nodes in a
doubly linked bindlist per symbol, so pd_unbind(object, symbol) takes
O(symbols per object) instead of O(objects per symbol), with the former
number generally much smaller than the latter number (at least in my
experience - are there any externals that bind to a large number of
symbols?  I did write one in Lua, but iirc pdlua uses one proxy object
for each binding, so that it can tell which symbol was the target of the
message).


Claude

On 10/08/13 01:06, Ivica Bukvic wrote:
> When and if such patch is implemented please do let us know as I would like
> to implement it in pd-l2ork as well.
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
> Ico
> On Aug 9, 2013 8:03 PM, "Miller Puckette" <msp at ucsd.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Well, if ia user really wants 32K receives of the same name, (s)he can have
>> them - but most people won't want to do that.  In contrast, you can't have
>> 32K copies of an abstraction without hitting this problem - and the
>> business
>> of binding patches to names is only rarely actually used.  So (I'm now
>> thinking)
>> Pd should make it easy to defeat that useless behavior.
>>
>> cheers
>> M
>> On Fri, Aug 09, 2013 at 07:11:02PM -0400, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
>>> On 08/09/2013 04:31 PM, Miller Puckette wrote:
>>>> Or... just limit the number of canvases that can bind themselves to a
>> single
>>>> symbol to a reasonable number (5 or so, settable by flag for
>> back-compatibility
>>>> if anyone cares).
>>>
>>> What happens to Claude's test if you a) patch Pd to stop binding
>>> pd-abstractionName.pd, and b) put a [receive pd-abstractionName.pd]
>>> inside the abstraction that's getting massively replicated?
>>>
>>> I'd hypothesize that you end up with the same or closely similar problem,
>>> no?
>>>
>>> If so then messing with the abstraction name binding risks introducing
>>> bugs or breaking some strange but interesting patches, and doesn't
>>> solve the larger problem which becomes anxiety about [s]/[r] pairs or
>>> any other nonlocal connection objects inside abstractions.
>>>
>>> -Jonathan
>>>
>>>>
>>>> cheers
>>>> M
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Aug 09, 2013 at 07:51:30PM +0100, Claude Heiland-Allen wrote:
>>>>> On 09/08/13 19:42, Miller Puckette wrote:
>>>>>> There still could be situations where an abstraction has a sub-patch
>> ("pd foo"
>>>>>> for instance) - I'm not clear as to whether those namings should be
>> supressed
>>>>>> as well.  It seems like a tricky problem - lots of people seem to use
>>>>>> abstractions with only one instance and might be depending on the
>> bindings.
>>>>> Maybe the best fix would be to make pd_unbind() constant time (perhaps
>>>>> by storing bindings in a doubly-linked list instead of a singly-linked
>>>>> list) and be done with it, instead of hacking workarounds..
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Claude

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