D for Speech and Signal Processing

[Frustrated]

On Thursday, 28 November 2013 at 10:30:36 UTC, Chris wrote:
> There are voice analysis and speech processing toolkits like 
> Covarep and Voicebox (see links below) that were coded in 
> Matlab, because they were originally only prototypes. There has 
> been talk of porting them to C++. My first thought, as you 
> might imagine, was why not use D? However, I don't know if 
> there are any performance issues, especially for real time 
> systems (in speech recognition), talking about GC, or in fact 
> any other issues (number grinding etc.).
>
> A lot of the analysis tools are based on some sort of HMM 
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Markov_model) and I think 
> D could handle that elegantly.
>
> https://github.com/covarep/covarep
> http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/hp/staff/dmb/voicebox/voicebox.html

The GC is the stop the world collector and a huge issue for real 
time processing. It is one of the major drawbacks of D for use in 
(near) real time software. Luckily you can get D to work without 
the GC but it is a huge pain in the ass.

But given the drawbacks it may be well worth it to start with D. 
The more interest in D the more likely these issues will be fixed.

Unfortunately I'm in a similar scenario and I hope that the GC 
will not be an issue in the end.