Is it feasible to port the Vorbis decoder/encoder to a platform without floating point support (such as a StrongARM CPU)?
The reference implementations of the Vorbis decoder and encoder provided on the vorbis.com download page depend heavily on floating point hardware. While this presents no problem for workstation-class CPUs (like x86 and PowerPC), it means that embedded CPUs without floating point support (as are often found in portable devices) are at a severe disadvantage. There are two possible ways to work around this problem: • Emulate the floating point instructions — Kernel emulation of floating point instructions is too slow to use for vorbis. There are userspace libraries which provide floating point emulation that might be fast enough for your hardware. Examples are MathLib for PalmOS and the -msoft-float support in GCC. • Change the vorbis library to use integer-only instructions — This is the more efficient solution, but also requires more specialized knowledge to implement. Several people seem to have attempted it or are working on it now, but no free integer-based Vorbis decoder exists a
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