Now that Pd has the beginnings of a fully functional namespace, its time to start thinking of Pd as a platform. The next big step is organizing the vast amount of code into coherent libraries with consistent interface paradigms. This page is a scratch pad to start working out ideas of how to organize the Pd platform libraries.

Library Structure

One key part is defining a standard library format. Libdir is close to working, but needs some additions to work for all libraries. One key thing to add to libdir is a shared library that is loaded first. Then when each objectclass is loaded from its individual file, the shared code will be available.

• libfoo.so (loaded by pd)

• libfoo.tcl (loaded by pd-gui)

Library Hierarchy

Generally, i + IOhannes? think, that we should differentiate between different types of data on a high level rather than a low level. e.g. i would recommend '/math/+' and '/audio/math/+~', instead of '/math/audio/+~' (as shown below). The reasoning behind this is, that the disambiguation at a low level will quickly become unmaintainable (except for some very generic types like signals and floats; as soon as you would like to apply this schematics to library-defined types (like image-buffers in pdp & Gem or grids in GridFlow?), hell will break loose.

References

• pd-dev-list discussion about categories

• G Holzmann's suggestions for gos08

• Pure Data Montréal abstrations

Pd-vanilla

For reference, here is the list of categories in Pd-vanilla 0.42-4 (notice some inconsistencies in the names, that could be corrected).

• glue

• time

• math

• midi

• tables

• misc

• audio math

• audio glue

• audio oscillators and tables

• audio filters

• audio delay

• subwindows

• data templates

• acessing data

• obsolete

Suggestions for the new category structure

glue

Dumb question: why is this section called glue? Would it make more sense to be called control? Or is it a too obvious csound reference?

• all objects from pd-vanilla's same category

• glue/time - time operations + info

  • all objects from pd-vanilla's same category

  • cputime, realtime, timer

  • time, gmtime, localtime

  • timezone

  • date +%Y.%M.%D

• glue/math - math operations

  • all objects from pd-vanilla's same category

  • cart2pol, rad2deg

  • FFT

  • convolution

  • math/list

  • math/matrix

• glue/tables

  • all objects from pd-vanilla's same category

  • relevant objects from pd-vanilla's acessing data category

  • VASP

midi

• all objects from pd-vanilla's same category

object - objects for building objects

• float_argument, symbol_argument, any_argument

• objects for handling dynamic patch generation

regexp - regular expressions

• regexp

• regsub

• pattern match

mapping - mapping data from inputs to outputs

• polar, spiral

• one2two, one2three

• lowpass

audio

Should this category be called signal instead of audio? (or again another csound reference?)

• audio/glue

  • all objects from pd-vanilla's same category

• audio/math

  • all objects from pd-vanilla's same category

• audio/oscillators

  • sine~, square~, triangle~, ...

  • audio/oscillators/pure

    • sine~, square~, triangle~ (two libraries probably make sense here, one for mathematically pure oscillators, and another for bandwidth-limited oscillators. Perhaps this could be called "generators")

• audio/tables

  • all objects from pd-vanilla's same category

• audio/time

  • all objects from pd-vanilla's same category

• audio/filter

  • all objects from pd-vanilla's same category

• audio/reverb

  • yafr~, freeverb~, etc.

• audio/synth

  • vocoder~, FM, karplus/strong, etc.

buffer - buffer data streams

why not join this category with glue/time?

• pipe

data templates

• all objects from pd-vanilla's same category

• relevant objects from pd-vanilla's acessing data category

graphics / video

• Gem

• Pidip

• Pdp

• Framestein

• Gridflow

gui - classes for building GUIs

• gui

  • vslider, hslider, bng, entry, knob, etc.

• gui/audio

  • dsp, slider+vu, Scope~, sonogram~, etc

• gui/file

  • playlist

• TkWidget - Pd ports of the Tk widgets

file - file operations

• chdir, chroot, mkdir, rmdir

• chmod, chown, umask

• ls, glob, link

• move, rename, copy, delete

• get file info (data, perms, size, atime, mtime, etc)

io - handle IO from files and ports

• usb, serial, parallel

• hid

• qlist, text, xml, sql

• mouse, joystick, gamepad, tablet

• multio, arduino, miditron, memPIO

net - network primitives

• sockets

• OSC, UPD

• URIs?

• HTTP

• streaming

databases - objects for using databases

• SQL a library for using SQL databases

misc

I suggest to deprecate this category from pd-van and divide the objects between other categories

subwindows

I suggest to deprecate this category from pd-van and divide the objects between other categories

obsolete

• all objects from pd-vanilla's same category

Documentation

After (or while) restructuring the new categories for pd-ext objects, an automatized solution for the documentation should be found. Here are some pointers:

• some suggestions at methods of organising an automatised documentation - follow thread

• sql database suggestion from dmotd

• lost the reference, can Mr. Schebella correct this sentence?

• (uncomplete) excel chart of pd-ext objects