padawan12 wrote:
I see a free software tool that does what Pd does and outputs code as an inevitability, sooner or later, it's just the logical thing to do. It's just that I'm rather scratching my head wondering why it doesn't do so already. Perhaps I've forgotten some fundamental reason why exploding the netlist into a code listing might not be trivial, reenterancy maybe,
Well possibly the fact that most pd patches are not strictly procedural, a list of instructions that is run through once. Messages can arrive at any time to modify what is going on... PD is already written in C and is basically a scheduler that calls functions at the appropriate times based on the messages the functions are emitting. It seems to me you can't get any further than that in C. Sure you can manually write any particular patch more efficiently as a standalone program but I doubt there is a general way to do that since there is no way to predict every possible state of every possible patch, hence no way to guarantee that a program is really the same as the original patch. IMHO, Martin