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 |
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man |
| contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. |
| -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery |
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Received on Thu Jun 9 20:15:09 2005
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