hthh
Do you currently use and rely on software which you expect won't be useful to you in ten years time? I can't think of much personally.
(I do use IDA Pro, which has clearly adapted poorly to changing requirements - it still has scars of the 32-bit to 64-bit transition that get in the way of day-to-day usage. I hope there'll be something better in ten years. Of course, I could buy a cheaper, "higher quality" tool instead, but none of them are as powerful or as useful.)
That said, if you want to read elegant code, I'd recommend the stb parser libraries (written in C). They are small self-contained decoders for many common media formats, with excellent documentation:
https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_image.h https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_truetype.h https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_vorbis.c
These libraries are likely insecure, handle many edge-cases incorrectly, implement fewer features, and perform worse than other options. However, they meet your criteria better.
I'm guessing the speed difference comes from this linker using a different approach to symbol resolution which requires visiting files fewer times, but I'm not sure.
"There's people who actually know WTF they're doing. (eg. encode.ru & the DCC's and so on). In that world you have compressors like PAQ, Nanozip, lzturbo, tornado, CCM, ZCM, Zstd, LZ4, BMF, BCIF, gralic, etc. etc.
"Then there's the mainstream world, where people still think gzip is state of the art (or ooh real modern bzip2), and they invent new things like brotli and webp and seem to not pay any attention to that alternate reality where the experts live. They sometimes do good work, but it's just a little odd."
- Charles Bloom, 10-02-15 (http://www.cbloom.com/rambles.html)
gcc: warning: couldn't understand kern.osversion '14.3.0
gcc (GCC) 4.8.2
Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.(I get a bunch of errors on OS X unless I change "CC=gcc" to "CC=clang", btw)