clazarou

Simple question, I think --- exactly what is the commonsyms.c? I see it mentioned in reference to building externals, and in the Graham Wakefield's c++ template for Max, but simply don't know what it is or exactly what it does, except that it "makes it work".

I'm really hoping y'all find some small satisfaction in answering rudimentary questions, as I feel a decent number coming on. I promise to use the SDK and the forum's search functions.

Simple question, I think --- exactly what is the commonsyms.c?  I see it mentioned in reference to building externals, and in the Graham Wakefield's c++ template for Max, but simply don't know what it is or exactly what it does, except that it "makes it work".

I'm really hoping y'all find some small satisfaction in answering rudimentary questions, as I feel a decent number coming on.  I promise to use the SDK and the forum's search functions.


commonsyms-c

Oh, how hilarious, I found something in the SDK after all. So, I found it while clicking around inside the "delay2" example, within the MaxAPI.framework. Can I assume that it's only function is to provide common graphics to represent the external being built?

Oh, how hilarious, I found something in the SDK after all.  So, I found it while clicking around inside the "delay2" example, within the MaxAPI.framework.  Can I assume that it's only function is to provide common graphics to represent the external being built?

 contains the main symbols we use. It's a way to improve the performance by using already cached symbols. For instance if you need to make a symbol, you'll use 

 which is quite slow because it has to look into a hash table to find if the symbol already exists (if so returns the pointer, if not create a new symbol and return the pointer). To improve performances it's best to cache a symbol (of course that it is if you know what it is in advance). So in short there's a good chance that the symbol is already cached somewhere if it's a widely used message name (open, read, clear...), so you can probably use _sym_open, _sym_read instead.

commonsyms.c contains the main symbols we use. It's a way to improve the performance by using already cached symbols. For instance if you need to make a symbol, you'll use gensym() which is quite slow because it has to look into a hash table to find if the symbol already exists (if so returns the pointer, if not create a new symbol and return the pointer). To improve performances it's best to cache a symbol (of course that it is if you know what it is in advance). So in short there's a good chance that the symbol is already cached somewhere if it's a widely used message name (open, read, clear...), so you can probably use _sym_open, _sym_read instead.