[Flac] Is FLAC hardware independent?

[Brian Willoughby]

On May 21, 2011, at 11:40, Neal B. wrote:
>> PS: Here is the answer of David Bryant, the developer of WavPack:  
>> "The WavPack codec is hardware independent; the standard "C"  
>> encoder will produce the same byte-for-byte output regardless of  
>> the CPU it is running on (assuming a properly working C compiler,  
>> of course)."
>
> The same is true of flac, as long as you're using the same version of
> the encoder, right? The same source code, compiled with the same
> options, on different hardware, will yield the same flac output,
> right?
Unless there is conditional compilation in the source.  It's entirely  
possible to surround a piece of code with an #ifdef that is specific  
to one or more processors, or even large groups of processors (big- 
endian versus little-endian).  I have not looked at every line of the  
source for FLAC, but it's possible that there are certain  
optimizations that are specific to one processor or another, either  
for speed or to avoid processor bugs.

Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting