I think this would be the only alternative other than tcl/tk myself.
I've been using tcl/tk for many many years now and It can be very very fast. The bottom line is not just that the toolkit is slow, its the damn fact that the PD patcher is a vector drawing. This stuff is just never all that fast in a toolkit (not enough need for them to optimize for it is there?) Illustrator is damn slow too (slower than pd actually) considering the complexity (number of lines) in PD patches we should be happy it is not even slower. MAX is fast (I think) due to a C GUI interface, I don't think anyone here wants to maintain that unless it solves a huge GUI difficiency. Unless there is a specific toolkit made for doing fast vector drawing stuff, I don't see how switching to another toolkit is really going to make a huge difference. An SDL/GL patcher would be very fast and allow some very cool things.
Of course I would not want to loose any great features, like dynamic patching, and dyanmic GUIS, I would like to keep all this (possible in SDL/GL?)
And for the record (for those not running on all platforms) windows takes the prize for fastest GUI patching. My ol 800 is great for it, In fact so much better I do most patching in (ick) windows. Linux is next, its pretty good, ok for almost everything, but I'd guess about 30% behind windows. OSX is almost useless for large copy-paste operations and GOPs on the g4 733, so slow I've been thinking about a performance environment where you use a windows/linux machine to run the GUI, and the PD DSP on the mac. Lots of extra effort, but perhaps worth it to get some nice gui feel...
Enough of me blabing.
B.
The main complaint is speed and looks right? Well, how about pulling out all the stops and going full on 3D rendering using OpenGL via GLUT or SDL? That would shut people the hell up about both. You want to see that array update at hundreds of FPS? Not a problem. You want glowing, translucent baubles in your patch? Sure go right ahead.
GLUT and SDL are highly portable, work on most platforms, and handle windowing, drawing, input devices and events. What more could you want? Oh yeah, you have a crappy video card... tough!!
My 2 pesos of input of the discussion.
cgc
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