My quest for a Linux audio player (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 6, 2006 19:38 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

Gstreamer has to do that, because it has to be coded for any eventuality and be usable by anyone. However, if you already know that you don't require anything other than the one format, or the one source of music, there's no need for that additional complexity.

Using off-the-shelf software is a trade-off; it states that your time is worth more than your machine's memory, and that writing code is Always Hard. Sometimes that's not the case - sometimes it's quicker to just get out the text editor and write exactly the code you need than it is to figure out the all-singing, all-dancing framework / library / whatever. For a proficient coder, "sometimes" might become "more often than not".

To tie it back to an earlier discussion, bloat is the price of not writing your own need-specific code.