Juha Vehviläinen wrote:
dear list, Miller,
how about general c++ wrappers for making writing externals more clear and simple? Gem (or gemPlus?) seems to have this approach, I wonder if others have thought of it. Are there efficiency issues?
juha
I've often thought of this, but never spent enough time to conjure up a good framework. I think it would be tricky to do this, while interfacing to the C-language PD.
For the first time today, I took a quick look at the Gem approach, but I'd have to look at it in a lot more detail to see whether it would work in general. I think that Mark had said once during a similar discussion on this list, that his classes where pretty much specific to the needs of Gem.
On my first reading of the Gem approach, I have to say that the macro approach used seems pretty ugly - it seems you have to define a macro for every combination of creation arguments that the object could have. But again, I haven't looked at it in detail. Also, I don't beleive that Gem deals at all with DSP processes.
Again, I don't know if I could do any better. I think a good C++ framework at the very least would have to employ some tricky template magic.
Certainly, if you have any ideas about how to implement such a thing, I'm sure that people on this list would be very interested and maybe we could come up with something.
You mention a concern about efficiency issues. I am quite sure that this would not be a concern. No, I think the biggest problem is how to interface a set of class heirarchies to the PD code.
Again, I have thought several times about this, and my mind got a little overwhelmed.
Larry