[openal] Upcoming OpenAL Soft release

[Chris Robinson]

Hi guys,

It's been too long since the last release (almost 2 years, yikes). I was 
hoping to have a couple more extensions done (the device clock and HRTF 
extensions) in time for 1.16, but it's not looking like it'll happen 
since they still need design work. There is, however, still a bunch of 
stuff ready, or just about ready, for this release -- new effect and 
filter types, new extensions, as well as SSE2/4.1-enhanced linear 
resamplers and other general improvements.

So if there's any specific testing you'd like to do, please do so, and 
if you're aware of any outstanding bugs, please let me know (the only 
serious bug I'm aware of is with the autowah effect, so that may be 
temporarily disabled for the release).

Also to note, this release will have a (minimal) GUI app for setting 
config file options, which requires Qt 4.8 or newer. There's also some 
examples that require SDL2, SDL_sound, and ffmpeg (avformat 55.33.100, 
avcodec 55.52.102, avutil 52.66.100, swscale 2.5.102, swresample 
0.18.100). These are not used by, or required for, the lib itself.

This may or may not also be the last release that can be built using 
MSVC. Regardless of what happens, the library *will* still be usable by 
MSVC, you will still be able to link with it in your projects and use 
the DLL with it. But it's getting harder to avoid C99 and C11, of which, 
MSVC's C compiler doesn't understand key language features. Lately, 
allowing MSVC to build it typically requires gimping the build process, 
disabling certain optimization features and wrapping code in obtrusive 
ways, that makes the results questionable.

Like I said before, though, I'm not out to specifically cut MSVC support 
for building the lib, but as things are going, it will eventually 
happen. As a side note, there is an interesting project called clang-cl 
<http://clang.llvm.org/docs/UsersManual.html#clang-cl>
which attempts to provide a cl.exe-compatible interface for Clang, which 
could be used within the VS IDE. Theoretically, this could be used to 
provide the necessary level of C99/C11 support needed for the future.