[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] NellyMoser audio decoder

[Reimar Döffinger]

Hello,
On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 01:32:24PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 02:13:36PM +0200, Reimar D?ffinger wrote:
[...]
> > yes, forget that part. Happens when you don't take your time...
> > Btw. would others prefer int16_t instead of short as well? I like it
> > better and I think it is more consistent with other ffmpeg code.
> > In addition it might be worth to check if those tables are better created
> > at runtime...
> 
> Runtime creation of tables is bad. If we could get rid of all the
> runtime tables it would be a big step forward for anti-bloat,
> simplicity, and preventing memleak issues in corner cases. (The other
> approaches aside from including tables directly in the source cause
> additional memory usage per-process and possibly memory leaks with
> libdl loading.)

While I am aware of the problems with it, to me ffmpeg is not just a
decoding library but also a project that should help people to learn not
understand things.
And in that respect, a runtime generated table is orders of magnitude
better than a table dumped into a source without documentation and even
confusing names (of course, the better solution is to just properly document
them and also give the formula/algorithm to regenerate them).
It is also worse for verifying correctness (would not be the first time
there if there is a typo in one of them).
Static tables also bloat the binary - while not such an important thing,
it is not irrelevant.

Greetings,
Reimar D?ffinger