> On Thursday, August 6, 2020, 2:07:09 PM EDT, matthew brandi <mfbrandi@outlook.com> wrote:

> Dear people

> In my role as village idiot, I am asking whether the string "fwd" in a message has a
special meaning to inlet.

> Naively, I was expecting inlet to pass the string to the subpatch, but it seems not
to. See example patch attached.

AFAICT that's a regression due to the way Pd Vanilla implemented message forwarding for
[inlet~ fwd]. That's a feature that allows a signal inlet of a subpatch/abstraction to forward
non-signal messages to the right outlet of [inlet~ fwd]. (The right outlet sprouts when the
"fwd" argument is present.)

Another regression-- there is no longer an error if you try to send a non-signal message to
[inlet~].

Another regression-- [inlet~ fwd] unconditionally allocates space on the stack to copy the
entire incoming message. If you generate a long enough message this will blow the stack
and cause Pd to crash. Esp. important given that Windows stack is much smaller than the RAM
available for heap allocation on most machines.

Also-- I *think* Pd Vanilla doesn't forward pointer messages through [inlet~ fwd]. It appeared to be an oversight-- at least I didn't see any comment about it.

A GSoC student spent some time reimplementing this in Purr Data, so none of thiese should be
issues there.

Best,
Jonathan