Hallo, Tim Blechmann hat gesagt: // Tim Blechmann wrote:
Of course we all know, that patched stuff id Pd is slower than coding stuff in C. Still we patch in Pd, why do we do it? Because performance is not all that matters, ease of programming, the ability to change an implementation on the fly etc. - all that is important as well and it is the major reason, scripting languages are taking over large parts of software development: The performance of the programmer is becoming the much more important bottleneck than the performance of the CPU.
right ... but that's why i think, reimplementing an external in pd is a waste of time. if there _is_ working c code, that's fine to use and, why shouldn't one just use it...
I don't want to forbid using externals at all, using - and writing - externals is as much part of Pd as patching is. However an external is a black box. Unless you know C, you cannot change its behaviour, even if you only want to add a little feature. Also seeing the algorithm at work in a graphical format can help with understanding it. You don't even need a help patch to see, how many abstractions work.
Then we have the problem with name clashes, which funnily occur mostly in trivial cases like the [counter]. Why write different versions of [counter]? Why write a simple [counter] external at all, when it's easier to do using [f] and [+]?
Most importantly though: Not everyone has every external installed. This is a real problem which I learned the hard way with RRADical, where in the beginning I said to myself: Go crazy and use every external there is to do the work. This was a bad mistake, because now all the time people come asking (me) how to compile the needed externals on Windows and I cannot help them. That's why I'm working on replacing most of the stuff used in RRADical with builtin objects. Unfortunatly there is nothing that can replace [pool] and [OSC] in Pd yet, and I don't want to ditch OSC support in RRADical and I cannot ditch [pool], which is a constant pool of trouble for non-technically inclined users. :(
Ciao
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__