Disadvantages:
- small processing and memory overhead
- size of externals (this will improve shortly)
size of externals is not too bad in linux, especially when you link to Flext as a shared library. But, I did notice that my externals are around 72k in linux, but up to 1MB under OS X (both were dynamically linked)
That's really strange... and i'm wondering why the OSX externals are that big because the resulting size is more than the sum the object file sizes including the flext library. I'll have to have time to read through the OSX development docs, i guess.... probably flext should be a framework on OSX.
however, one disadvantage I see in flext is that users of your external have to download YET ANOTHER piece of software to get yours to compile or work. Would be great if Flext was distributed with PD per default as a C++ interface.
I'd certainly be glad if this were the case. However, things to sort out before are - make shared flext a standard for all platforms, including a foolproof versioning system - have a few patches to PD (already in the devel branch) included into the Miller version, namely -- array time stamping -- portable stack checking - check whether data structures can be properly handled with flext
Apart from that i think flext is quite stable
best greetings, Thomas