Hi everyone, hoping to get opinions from gurus on here, who have been *incredibly* helpful in getting my project to where its at. A million thank yous!

Ok, the situation so far, which is working well:

- the app uses a generalized 'message' structure, all the different forms of messages fit into this structure by having it act alike a union. ( ie, a message always takes up the same amount of space, no matter the type )

- messages do not container pointers, in order that they be simple to send and receive over network clients, hardware, etc

- there are ringbuffers between my audio thread and real time thread

What I'm tackling:

- I want to add the capability for messages to have deferred execution, so they can be sent with a 'process at 4:3:1' kind of thing

- I think the best tradeoff for my app so far will be to use a hybrid of a timeline array and a linked list. there will be coarse time values stored by raw array indexing, speeding up lookup, and fine time values will be stored in the messages themselves

- so, when the engine is processing deferred messages, it will go and check timelineArray for all messages at bar 1:beat 1, which will be a linked list of all the messages with start time between bar:1 beat 1 and bar 1: beat 2 ( time resolution may change, this just for example

- then the engine iterates on every tick through that list of messages. This way, iteration on every tick is limited to a reasonable sized linked list and I can play with the cpu vs data storage equation by simply changing the resolution of the time line array

Issues:

- I need to allocate memory for new linked list items in the realtime thread

- the timeline array needs to be able to grow in the real time thread

Thoughts:

- I don't need to get it perfect *right now* but I need to be able to change it to Really Good later

- I checked out some resources, like this one the Design Patterns for Real-Time Computer Music Systems

and the supercollider book chapter and see there are a lot of options

- I could pre-allocate a giant list of messages and pluck the data off that list when I need to make a new one

- I could pre-allocate a block of memory and allocate off that

- I could allocate in the non-realtime thread and then pass memory over in queues. 

Would love to hear opinions on how others would solve these, including tradeoffs of each.