[ExtractStream] Random SplitStream Thoughts...

[Mark Jeffcoat]

On Sat, Feb 09, 2002 at 07:41:58AM -0800, Roger Merchberger wrote:
> The ones I understood were *super* helpful - a couple went over me
> head... such a long road, but like the roads of Basic, 6809 assembly,
> perl, cobol, APL, JCL and to a lesser extent Pascal, Lisp, Logo...
> one must start learning & keep using it enough to get it beat into
> this tired old brain of mine... (why is 6809 index register
> redirection & writing 8-bit position independant code so easy for me,
> but C pointers so frelling hard???)
> 

C is easy, but most of the programs that show up here are
difficult, crammed with magical numbers and unmotivated 
algorithms necessary to appease the MPEG gods. Ick.

I've been toying with splitstream recently, too; mostly
trying to cut parse_chunk() into bit-sized pieces. I may
post something more formal in a few days, but feel free
to send me an email if you'd like to see the work in progress--
you may find it more easily digestible than what you're
looking at now.

The memory problems you're looking at are probably red
herrings. Someone else has pointed out that you operating
system should clean up un-freed memory no matter how the 
program exits, so the only real concern is making sure
that programs don't end up wasting so much memory while
they're running that they start using unnecessary swap space.
I don't think this is a major concern for splitstream, but
if you're interested in a permanent fix, look into giving
up manual memory management alltogether:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/

-- 
Mark Jeffcoat