Meta-Programming and Policy-Based Design as a Technique of Architecting Modular and Efficient DSP Algorithm Implementations

Abstract

Meta-programming paradigm and policy-based design are less known programming techniques in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) community, used to coding in pure C or assembly language. Major software components, like C++ STL, have proven usefulness of such paradigms in providing top performance of highly optimised native code, along with abstraction and modularity necessary in complex software projects. This paper describes composition of DSP code using these techniques, bringing as an example implementation of Feedback Delay Network (FDN) artificial reverberation algorithm. The proposed approach was proven to be practical, especially in case of prototyping computationally intense algorithms. To provide further performance insight, we discuss the techniques in context of other optimisation methods, like Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) instruction sets usage and exploitation of superscalar architecture capabilities.