hi all,
i was thinking about adding some non-blocking message queue mechanism to pd, to simplify writing externals with their own worker threads that cannot, by design, block the audio thread.
i've found the need for this in almost all of my pd projects that use threads, and the only one that has solved it somewhat properly is wvvw.. adding support to pd would prevent a lot of hassle. it could serve as an 'external design pattern' actually.
this could be implemented in the form of a pd-message queue. even a simple fixed size ringbuffer containing fixed size pd atoms would be a very nice thing to have as a standard part of pd. it doesn't require platform-specific code, and doesn't use dynamic memory allocation for each message.
this can catch most of the communication needed between the main pd thread and a bunch of isolated worker threads, and do it in a way that forces you to not cause drops.
something like:
typedef struct { t_atom *buffer; int length; // single message length in atoms int size; // total number of messages int read; // read atom index int write; // write atom index } t_queue;
t_atom *queue_read(t_queue *q); // returns NULL if queue empty int queue_write(t_queue *q, t_atom *a); // returns error code if full void queue_free(t_queue *q); t_queue *queue_new(int length, int size);
another thing that i've been looking for, is a standard way to hook into the main scheduler loop to add a poll hook. you can do this with clocks, but an explicit hook at the point where the gui is polled for updates would be much cleaner. maybe 2 hooks: one that runs at the dsp tick, and one that runs at gui tick.
so the pattern is: thread->pd: a message queue with poller in pd scheduler pd->thread: another message queue with poller in worker thread
the pollers are application-specific, but some could be included in the pd api, like a poller that sends messages to a certain object, or a receiving symbol. this is not really necessary though.
my apologies if i missed out one some discussion on this subject, but i think this would be trivial to add and very useful.
tom