[Gridflow-dev] revamp of GridFlow

[Mathieu Bouchard]

here are some news about the direction that GridFlow is taking this month:

GridFlow gets GEM support thru [#export_pix] and [#import_pix].

GridFlow is getting ltilib support (http://ltilib.sourceforge.net/), with 
the help of Heri Andria, Michael Neuroth, Alexandre Castonguay.

--debug-harder (a ./configure option) is gone: in the C++ code, every
occurrence of Pt<T> has been replaced by good old T*, making GridFlow's
code a bit less alien (STACK_ARRAY and ARRAY_NEW are also byebye). That
"buffer overflow detector" never was much useful anyways. If you need the
effect of --debug-harder, use a very nice program called "valgrind", which
can trap most problems that Pt<T> could, and also can find lots of other
problems (leaks, danglings, uninitializeds, etc)

i am replacing a lot of "int" by "long". This will enable 64-bit mode
support on Linux and OSX. This excludes win64 though, so maybe it isn't
that much of a great idea. (but who wants to take care of porting GF to
Microsoft anyway?)

For converting values from Ruby to C++ and back, we're switching from a
very simple system called "convert" to a very simple system called "struct
R". The latter is more powerful and more invisible too. Note: we're not
using SWIG because GF's C++ code is already full of Ruby-aware code and
that's not how SWIG wants to work. Plus I think "struct R" is a nice
experiment in minimalism.

I thought of introducing some kind of thing I might call "Buffer" or 
"Extent" or "borrowing-Grid" which would be a pointer to an interval of 
memory (that is, pointer to beginning and pointer to end or length of 
interval). It would be used for accelerating ruby-based gridhandlers and 
maybe for simplifying c++-based gridhandlers (??). I've tried to do it and 
thrown my changes away. I'll retry soon.

I'm considering throwing away "make install" any day now (you'd just move 
your source folder to lib/pd/extra). Also I might get rid of "mkmf.rb"
(and of all the big hacks I had to do to circumvent it...)

that's it for now.

 _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada