[bitwize]

Indeed.

I would go so far as to say that a large part of why audio is such a CF under Linux is -- wait for it -- lack of real asynchronous I/O.

Audio is asynchronous by nature, and to do that right under Linux you need a "sound server" with all the additional overhead, jank, and shuffling of data between kernel and at least two different user spaces that implies. Audio under Linux was best with OSS, which was synchronous in nature and not suitable for professional applications. JACK mitigated that somewhat, but for an OS to do audio right you need a kernel-level async audio API like Core Audio or whatever Windows is doing these days.

[makomk]

Windows has a sound server too, you know. I believe Core Audio on Mac does too. A large part of why audio is such a CF under Linux is that PulseAudio is incredibly badly written and poorly maintained. My favourite was the half-finished micro-optimization that broke some of the resamplers because the author got bored and never modified them to handle the change, which somehow made it all the way into a release. I dread to think what they'd do with powerful tools like asynchronous I/O.