[Ffmpeg-devel] SVN dump

[Rich Felker]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 04:50:24PM -0400, Dave Dodge wrote:
> loadable code.  Mercurial does appear to have a couple of .so files in
> its Python modules, I assume for performance-critical functions.

Great, there goes the last hope for Mercurial...

> > Haskell is only difficult if you cannot think in a functional
> > language.
> 
> From what little I've seen of it, it's the syntax and functional
> purity -- such as everything being immutable -- that makes it
> difficult.  I'm sure this same aspect makes it great for academic and
> theory work, though it doesn't make me any happier to see Haskell when
> trying to skim through a research paper.

These qualities are good for practical work too if you learn how to
think about them. Maybe not for systems programming or video decoding,
but for a large problem space it's nice.

On the other hand, I think some functional ideas are actually
applicable to video processing. The video filter layer I've proposed
[in outline form only] can actually be seen as an application of
functional programming, whereby filter authors are requested to
specify just the computations and the data needed to perform them,
rather than an overall imperative program flow. This makes it possible
to do things like lazy evaluation, reordering for cache-optimality,
skipping filterring of pixels that will just be thrown away by
cropping or overlays, etc...

Rich