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BACKGROUND:
I started coding this because I couldn't find a fixed point FFT that didn't
use assembly code. I started with floating point numbers so I could get the
theory straight before working on fixed point issues. In the end, I had a
little bit of code that could be recompiled easily to do ffts with short, float
or double (other types should be easy too).
Once I got my FFT working, I was curious about the speed compared to
a well respected and highly optimized fft library. I don't want to criticize
this great library, so let's call it FFT_BRANDX.
During this process, I learned:
1. FFT_BRANDX has more than 100K lines of code. The core of kiss_fft is about 500 lines (cpx 1-d).
2. It took me an embarrassingly long time to get FFT_BRANDX working.
3. A simple program using FFT_BRANDX is 522KB. A similar program using kiss_fft is 18KB (without optimizing for size).
4. FFT_BRANDX is roughly twice as fast as KISS FFT in default mode.
It is wonderful that free, highly optimized libraries like FFT_BRANDX exist.
But such libraries carry a huge burden of complexity necessary to extract every
last bit of performance.
Sometimes simpler is better, even if it's not better.
-- Mark Borgerding
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