The Dali multimedia software library

This paper presents a new approach for constructing libraries for building processing-intensive multimedia software. Such software is currently constructed either "from scratch" or by using high-level libraries. We have found that the second approach produces inefficient code, while the first approach is time-consuming. We therefore designed and implemented Dalí, a set of reusable, high-performance primitives and abstractions that are at an intermediate point in this design space. By decomposing common multimedia data types and operations into thin abstractions and primitives, programs written using Dalí are shorter and more reusable then hand-tuned C code, yet achieve competitive performance. This paper describes the design and implementation of Dalí.