On Thu, Apr 12, 2001 at 09:44:35AM -0400, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 12, 2001 at 01:41:15PM +0200, Daniel Kobras wrote:
>
> > I'm currently trying to package libdv, a library to de- and encode
> > Digital Video data. On x86, it makes heavy use of optimised assembler
> > routines that are non-relocatable. Therefore, building a shared lib of
> > libdv fails miserably. I've contacted upstream, and they prefer to only
> > distribute a static lib because performance will drop otherwise. Fine
>
> Does this mean that on non-x86 architectures, it uses a C equivalent? If that
> is so, then you could use the C equivalent to build a shared library on x86.
I thought about this as well, and in principle this would be possible.
However, the C version is not really usable. The drop in performance compared
to the asm version is an estimated factor of ten. As apps usually default
to be linked against the shared version, this huge discrepancy in my
opinion is not really desirable. But it's true: x86 is the showstopper for
all other archs, and this bothers me. On the other hand, x86 is probably
the only arch where libdv can sensibly be used, simply because of its asm
optimisations.
Best regards,
Daniel.
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