7 ms·

And yet, FFmpeg couldn't really have been written in anything else. A 5% difference in performance could be the difference between a 1080p video decoding in rea

by rossy 13y ago

And yet, FFmpeg couldn't really have been written in anything else. A 5% difference in performance could be the difference between a 1080p video decoding in real time on a low powered device like a phone or a netbook and the video decoding slightly slower than real time. Improvements to FFmpeg made my old netbook work as a video player. I don't think I would have been able to use an FFmpeg-based player at all if it had the overhead of being written in a more memory safe language.

pjmlp 13y ago
Those 5% are written in Assembly anyway. C does not expose SIMD, non portable compiler specific extensions do. For the remaining 95% of the code, since 1978 one could use Modula-2, Ada, Pascal dialects, SafeC and many other system programming languages. Back in the early 80's, C compilers were as crap as any other system programming languages when generating code for home computers.