As another tip to Lua, there is the UserData type which is basically a wrapper for an opaque pointer which language wrappers can use for their non-native types. I could imagine Pd having something similar for complex, non-native external types with some basic memory safety checks. If we had that, we could experiment with adding a more complex dict-style type, for e

On Feb 12, 2026, at 2:24 PM, Miller Puckette via Pd-list <pd-list@lists.iem.at> wrote:

Yeah, pointers are way too complicated to use... I'm trying to think of ways to improve that :)

Miller

On 2/12/26 1:58 PM, Patrice Colet wrote:
Hello,

 just to add my brain fart too, pointers are the most efficient data storing/retrieving I've ever met in PureData, but it also the most complicated to manage in a patch without crashing the whole thing... Pointers have get set methods and can store all PureData types, and it's very fast, if not the the fastes method. Meanwhile, it's dedied to graphical stuff and not very convenient for users that are not very very experimented, and maybe also for the experimented ones, otherwise there would be already many proposals for managing pointers.

best regards

Le 12 févr. 2026 à 12:46, Sam Ross <samueljohnross@gmail.com> a écrit :

Hi, this may just be a brain fart as I'm no dev and am not acquainted with json/the nested structures you are talking about, but it strikes me that [list store] could be used to make a more flexible [value] type object, by using the fact you can send it the [send $0/foo( message to request the list... with an abstraction based on this you could have at least have arbitrary list-based variables that you could dynamically get & set. Just mentioning it in case it sparks anything off for anyone, please disregard if not!

Cheers, Sam.
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