hi Orm,
Orm Finnendahl wrote: ...
I don't really understand, what you're asking. Shall we do experiments on our own and share the results?
not if you trust my results :)
Actually I do not trust them either, because there are just too many things to account for in designing the tests. The outcome is quite obvious: allocating in each call is expensive. But how expensive, and does it really matter in practice? After doing the maths I found out that 1) the average cost of one getbytes/freebytes pair is somewhere around memcpying of 120 atoms, and 2) I do not know what this really means.
Perhaps this is all a matter of taste? So I simply need some guidance from people more experienced than myself, and with a better taste than mine.
Anyway, I tried to explain what I am up to in my first post:
I am asking this in the context of porting max classes to Pd. I suspect, that most of the originals use method no 1.
In many cases, the only trouble in porting a max class to Pd is to answer the very same question I am asking in this thread.
It is about: choose the best way now, then reuse'' vs.make ad hoc decision each time there is some spare time to spend
coding next class''...
Krzysztof