[linux-audio-dev] [ot] [rant] gcc, you let me down one time too many

[Fred Gleason]

On Wednesday 08 June 2005 09:12, Paul Davis wrote:
> SAWstudio is a pretty full-featured DAW that is, AFAIK, written almost
> entirely in x86 assembler. Its blazingly fast and yet dinosaur like at
> the same time, from what I hear.

I had a chance to meet Bob Lentini (SAW's developer) about ten years ago at 
NAB.  Brilliant guy.  SAW was one of the very first multitrack DAWs for PCs, 
and is indeed written almost entirely in x86 assembly.  The original target 
platform was high-end 386 and 486 systems, and I can personally testify that 
it performed very well on those boxes.  This was back when a 1 GB SCSI drive 
could run well over $2000 US.  I suspect that Bob's choice of assembly was 
driven by a very practical need: it was the only way to achieve acceptable 
performance on the available hardware of the day.  As such, it was a 
perfectly reasonable design tradeoff.

Today however, I think it'd be a foolish choice.  Modern systems have orders 
of magnitude more processing power, and it'd be silly to devote 10x the time 
developing an assembly-based version of something that could be made to work 
quite acceptably in a higher-level language.  It's all about balance.  To be 
sure, different designers will choose different tradeoffs between 
speed/efficiency/maintainability, but that's to be expected.  This is an area 
where the *science* of application design blends imperceptibly into the 
*art*.

Cheers!


|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. | Director of Broadcast Software Development  |
|                           |             Salem Radio Labs                |
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