Here's another idea. Our support for sound is not great, as I discovered when I did the ALSA port (which I recently discovered is broken on modern Linuxes, by the way; it just makes an annoying buzzing sound). To play a sound file, we have to read the file into memory, taking care not to corrupt the file with character conversions, then feed the bytes in memory to the appropriate sound library, even if the library is fully capable of reading the file itself. The support for not blocking while the sound plays doesn't always work. The whole audio support thing could use a makeover.

I've got a few half-baked ideas that I'll try to bake more completely and propose. I'm leaving town for a week in just a couple of hours, so this will probably have to wait until I return.