Hi,

PD is often said to be meant to be a tool for just prototyping.

It certainly had to be so when it was born but hey, nowadays, with the available cpu power of average machines... don't you think that it is no more necessarily so?

I'm curious: how many of you really re-code their pd patches into something else when you're finished experimenting and you've reached a reasonably "final" version of what you're patching? I don't.

I put this under the thread of "pd evolution" because in my opinion, in my wishes, in my personal vision of pd's future, one really important step would be to assume it is no more a tool for prototyping but an environment for developing final applications. I think pd-vanilla is the data-flow, audio-oriented analoguous of an interpreted programming language. Ok, an interpreted language is 1000 times slower than a compiled one, so, in the case of applications requiring 100% state-of-the-art cpu power, it can only be used for prototyping; however, for applications that require much less computing power than is available, a lot of interpreted languages are used for developing real-life applications.

IMHO there are just a couple of crucial things that need to be solved in order to make that step in PD. One is a few bugs that make your life impossible when you're developing a somewhat "large" application (i.e. many abstraction, reused many times, and nested, as is needed when designing a complex system either top-down or bottom-up or mixed). Every time you hit CTRL+S, you're likely to be obliged to close PD and restart it. And the second is the GUI is tremendously slow. I don't mind it may be somewhat limited if one wants to build arbitrary interfaces. I just accept (and eventually love) pd's gui, with its bangs, toggles, sliders, and the way they work; with appropriate programming (i.e. patching) they are powerful (you can use them as display avoiding manual changes, you can obtain multiple controllers of the same value that don't loose their coherence etc etc). I just take them as they are and as they work... but the problem is: it's all so slow. I can't believe it can't be faster and less cpu-expensive.

Reimplementing the CURRENT guy mechanism, without any change in its "specifications", in a faster way would be imho an enormous benefit to those who use PD as a developing environment. Because it would encourage rather than discourage such practices as nesting GOP-enabled abstractions to mantain complex interfaces manageable.

I don't know whether some of the aspects I describe are specific to the Windows version, as I only use PD under Windows. However, coherently with the idea of a reliable developing environment, if this environment is supposed to be platform-independent, platform-specific issues should be solved.

I'd love to hear other opinions about all this.

Bye m.

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