[daeken]

Back in ~2004, I worked on a project to define a codec virtual machine, with the goal of each file being able to reference the standard it was encoded against, along with a link to a reference decoder built for that VM. My thought was that you could compile that codec for the system you were running on and decode in software, or if a sufficient DSP or FPGA was available, target that.

While it worked, I don't think it ever left my machine. Never moved past software decoding -- I was a broke teen with no access to non-standard hardware. But the idea has stuck with me and feels more relevant than ever, with the proliferation of codecs we're seeing now.

It has the Sufficiently Smart Compiler problem baked in, but I tried to define things to be SIMD-native from the start (which could be split however it needed to be for the hardware) and I suspect it could work. Somehow.