Am I right to assume that this would include writing arrays to disk without 
interfering with the audio thread?
I don't think so, but there's already a separate PR for that: https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/pull/1357

Actually, I am not sure what Giulio meant with "disk I/O". Maybe that the I/O thread could also be used to stream audio to/from disk? Personally, I would keep networking and audio streaming on different threads as they don't necessarily have the same priority.

---

Generally, I see three categories of worker threads:

1) the task has to meet a certain deadline. One example is streaming audio to/from disk: it eventually has to happen within a certain time frame, but the time frame can be made larger with additional buffering.

2) the task has no deadline but should be completed as fast as possible. One example is network I/O.

3) the task has no time constraints at all. One example is loading soundfiles from disk: you don't really care how much time it takes, the only important thing is that it doesn't block other threads.

Supercollider's original "scsynth" Server has a thread for disk streaming (1) plus a thread for asynchronous tasks which includes outgoing network packets (2 + 3). The latter is not ideal, because it means that networking can be temporarily blocked by time consuming tasks. For this reason, the more recent "supernova" Server has a dedicated thread for outgoing network packets.

Christof

On 17.07.2021 14:45, Edwin van der Heide wrote:
Dear Giulio,

Am I right to assume that this would include writing arrays to disk without 
interfering with the audio thread?

Best! Edwin

On 16 Jul 2021, at 00:18, Giulio Moro via Pd-dev <[email protected]> wrote:

I have had this PR open for a while: https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/pull/1261 . It adds 
threaded behaviour for disk and network I/O, making the Pd audio thread "real-time 
safer". I went through quite a few revisions courtesy of umlaeute and Spacechild1, but haven't 
heard from you directly. I am happy to do some more work if there is interest in merging. CI build 
currently fails because of weird "support" of ssize_t on VS (happy to hear about 
workarounds).
Best,
Giulio


Miller Puckette via Pd-dev wrote on 13/07/2021 19:22:
(re-send - I had sent to [email protected] but that now seems to be defunct...)
To Pd dev -
I'm going to try to get the next Pd release (0.52) out over the next month
or two.  My personal priorities for this release would be putting in a message
backtrace mechanism (by overriding canvas_connect and pd_bind to go through
small proxy objects; this will have to be done at load time I think) and
to go back and try to figure out how to do tooltips without adding cruft to
the inlet structure.  (There's an ancient source-patch to provide tooltips
by Chris McCormichadn Guenter Geiger that I plan to start with -
https://sourceforge.net/p/pure-data/patches/264/).
Before doing that I want to do some reorganizing - in porting Pd to FreeRTOS
(so I can run it on an Espressif LyraT board, which I think takes only about
10 or 20% of the current that a Pi needs) I found out that I had to move
a few functions from one file to another.
This might break some PRs, so... first of all would be to identify whatever
PRs are ready to merge so I can do that before I make incompatible changes.
Of course "stable development branch" first... then Dan's soundfile updates...
then what?
PS more ideas of mine (among many):
hot-reloading externs via a message to Pd
use a "unix binding" socket between Pd and pd-gui instead of localhost
generalize number/symbol box to allow displaying entire messages or lists
cheers
Miller
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