Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
I've recently been working with 80MHz machines that don't even have FPUs, so I also care about oooold machines. (These little computers are known as "iPods").
One thing that is definitely worth trying is to update to the latest version of Tcl/Tk. They have done a lot of optimization in 8.5, I think on X11 too.
Another thing to try is writing the GUI in a toolkit that is optimized for speed. I don't know if you have a GPU, but if you wrote Pd GUI objects using something like togl or tkzinc, both use OpenGL, that could also help.
i am still pretty convinced that tcl/tk is not the buster, so replacing it by someting more performant will only give you little help. the problem comes from how Pd(-core) communicates with the Pd-gui; and that Pd(-core) needs a lot of calculation power to make Pd-gui draw something nicely. unless this calculations are done on the Pd-gui side, i see little chances that things will improve.
having said all that, i honestly do not understand how the matter of CPU-hungry gop objects impose any problems on slow machines. you are surely not saying, that you develop your patches for iPod/wearables/P-100 andwhatelse with graphical objects.(?!)
personally i cannot imagine developing cpu-intensive patches on my current machine, which is a by-now-rather-oldish amd64 x2 dual-core (well, Pd cannot use more than 1 core anyhow) 4200+, with GOP enabled.
gfmasdr IOhannes