[Flac-dev] last minute changes

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2001 at 09:37:47AM -0800, Josh Coalson wrote:

> sse also requires operating system support.  thanks to intel's brilliant
> design, the only real way to do this at flac runtime is for the library to
> fork() itself, run some sse instructions in the new process, and watch if
> it crashes.  quietly forking in a library is bad since some library users
> may not want to fork (like if their process image is huge) for such a
> simple thing.

One possible solution would be to add a FLAC API call to do the detection.
That way, the client could ask for SSE autodetection (or perhaps force it on
if it knows better) only when it is desired.

How much are the SSE optimizations really worth, in terms of benchmarks?  Is
it worthwhile to try to make them available to everyone?

-- 
 - mdz