De: "Roman Haefeli" reduzent@gmail.com
Hi all
The thread below makes me curious about what people think about the support of two or more several implementations of the similar functionality.
There are a few such cases:
- [ext13/wavinfo] vs. [iemlib/soundfile_info]
- OSCx vs. mrpeach's osc library
- arraysize vs.[expr size("array-name")] (which could be turned
easily into an abstraction)
There are certainly more similar examples. Is that a good or a bad thing? Do you rather find it annoying when you find two or more implementations for the same thing or do you consider it a question of choice: more is better? Is it possible at all to make generalizations about that? Is it the lesser of two evils to keep each implementation for the sake of backwards compatibility or is it preferable to focus on one single (best working) implementation and get rid of the rest (which breaks compatibility, of course)?
My personal stance on the issue: I don't remember all cases, but in the case of [wavinfo] vs. [soundfile_info] I spent a lot of time figuring out which works for which files. Also, I wanted to know which is mature enough so that it's worth to write bug reports to its author. This consumes quite some time and I think everyone who discovers that there are many solutions for her problem needs to invest some time to find out which works best. Personally, I think this is lost time, because not only it needs twice as much time to implement the same thing twice, every user needs to figure out the small differences. Well aware, that this (my) opinion is likely not applicable to others, I tend to think that patches are too much treated like holy cows whose breaking should be avoided by any means. If it turns out, that my patches use an inferior of concurrent implementations, I'd be happy to switch them to the new class, especially if it helps to keep the future clean.
Hi Roman,
I think that it's better when we can modify the behavior of an object by modifying a pd patch. When everything is enclosed into an external, somehow it's private, and then it's not really pd anymore. More people are able to debug a pd patch, anyone could fix the problem without compiling anything.
We should use C language only when we need it, in the example of [waveinfo] vs [soundfile_info], both aren't the good way for me, we just need the [binfile] external for reading the header, and all the other stuff can be done into a pd patch.
my one cent