I am considering moving to pd my performative instrument coded in max/msp, for the sake of mantainability and the joy of open and free software. I face a major challenge. Most of my code is written in gen~, which allows single-sample operations, and I don’t know how to port this to pd, whether pd has something similar to gen~ or what could be other approaches to operate on a sample level within pd. Could you please advice me? Thank you!

Ardore

and then you ask for numbers from the array with tabread will give you one number from the list. which they call a sample. etc sample rate...

In context of the question, this is not quite revelant.

First, it's about audio signals -- not [tabread], but rather [tabread~] or [tabread4~].

Second, audio objects don't operate sample by sample, but rather block by block.

The question doesn't state it explicitly, but it can be inferred from context that the "single-sample operation" being referred to is single-sample feedback. Feedback always requires delay, and, using normal audio objects, the minimum delay is the block size. This places limits on the capability of implementing filters, Karplus-Strong plucked strings (this is one of the OP's keywords), waveguides etc.

@ardore In Pd, AFAIK pretty much all you've got is to set a subpatch's [block~] settings to block size = 1. Then that part of the graph will run everything by single samples (but outside the subpatch / abstraction window will run with normal block size).

I'm not aware of anything gen~ like in Pd (which isn't surprising, since David Zicarelli says it took their team of paid professional developers something like 6 years before gen~ was ready to ship -- an unpaid FLOSS team is unlikely to be able to duplicate that engineering effort). There might be something that I just didn't hear of...? But I doubt it.

Something that Pd devs might consider is to leverage another similar technology. For instance, a SC contributor released "DynGen" a few months ago, which wraps Reaper's audio-fx dev language "eelscript" into a SC unit generator. Eelscript can do a lot of gen~-like things, and... Reaper devs did the hard work! Might be interesting to have a Pd signal-object wrapper for eelscript...

hjh

You can also use [fexpr~] to run mathematical expressions on specific samples in a block.

Exporting code using the Heavy Compiler will run single sample by default.