To be honest, I have not looked at Pd's GUI code and I don't know if I'd be able to understand it really. Perhaps there is much that can be done to speed Tcl/tk up. But i'm under the impression that a replacement GUI is still the way to go.
not sure about that. For as little as I know about Tcl/Tk, I think it fits well in pd's philosophy and needs. It's very portable and extensible and there appears to be a lot of room for optimization.
I'm wondering how this would affect externals developers, though? Would new libraries be built to allow easy access to a new Pd GUI? Or would they be expected to learn the new toolkit (wx or not)?
I can imagine some externals would have to be reprogrammed.
Tcl/tl is very portable and feels responsive enough to me even on my old laptop (Pentium 133) which is not really the best system for realtime audio. I cannot say the same about wxWindows.
You say you cannot say the same about wxWindows. Is that because you have had been results with wxWindows programs, or because you have not used wxWindows before?
I considered learning the wxWindows API myself and did not really like it. I would rather consider using Qt, but I don't think that's what pd needs. Wxwindows applications seem to be quite resource-hungry, probably because extra stuff that is not necessarily needed gets linked when building programs. At least that was my impression when I was on the look-out for a GUI API. I could really tell the difference on older machines.
cheers,
::: sam :::