[alsa-devel] a newbie overwhelmed with this API

[Adam Seychell]

I'm writing simple audio application and I have successfully used the 
DirectSound API under Windows. Now I'm looking at porting to Linux using 
ALSA. I have tried reading the online ALSA API documentation, but it 
seems too early in development and insufficient compared what one can 
learn reading Microsoft's DirectX SDK documentation. Excuse my ignorance 
for a minute, but the API seems quite large compared to DirectSound and 
so I'm wondering if there is good reason why so many functions exists ?
Was there an early design decision not to write ALSA in C++ ?

I would like to help out with documentation but of course I thats 
impossible for someone who is a complete novice to the ALSA project. I 
know that writing good documentation takes a lot of hard work, 
especially for software developers who spend enough time on coding. Its 
an unfortunate paradox among all open source projects. Software 
developers who posses the knowledge can't readily communicate it to 
potential volunteer documentation writers in an open source environment.

Adam