[OT] ALSA userspace API complexity

Alistair John Strachan
2006-01-04T09:37:55Z

On Tuesday 03 January 2006 23:10, Tomasz KÅ‚oczko wrote:
[snip]
>
> 2) ALSA API is to complicated: most applications opens single sound
> stream.

FUD and nonsense. I've written many DSP applications and very often I can
recycle the same code for use in them. Here's an example, abstracted,
commented, handling errors from the subsystem, in just over 100 LOC.

http://devzero.co.uk/~alistair/alsa/

The API is really _only_ complicated because it expects you to set things OSS
either can't handle or doesn't allow you to configure. Things that very often
an application will eventually care about. All this for the sake of 5 minutes
reading documentation, and each API call almost identical in design.

Personally, I found the lack of documentation for some of the setup API
annoying, but it's since been rectified and each call is humanly
understandable.

--
Cheers,
Alistair.

'No sense being pessimistic, it probably wouldn't work anyway.'
Third year Computer Science undergraduate.
1F2 55 South Clerk Street, Edinburgh, UK.