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by delroth 3647 days ago
A few points I can think of:

* It's more mature than many other emulation projects. Work started in 2003, and it has been open sourced 8 years ago.

* From the beginning there were a few people with strong software engineering background working on the project, which helped nail down a good design that still mostly holds today.

* We have people who care deeply about the design and cleanliness of the project. See for example https://lioncash.github.io/2016/06/21/dolphin-50-personal-pl... from one of our developers. We have been using C++11 since ~2013, and we're already relying on C++14 nowadays.

* We have invested a lot of time in developer tooling and infrastructure. Each of our PR is auto-built on 7 OS/architectures and we also run regression tests for our graphics rendering pipeline. This makes it easier to screw up and allows us to move faster.

* Most of our contributors are technical (developers) but we also make a great use of our non technical contributors. We have a great team of translators, community managers, "PR" people, wiki maintainers, etc. that help free time for the developers to focus on what they do best. For example, the whole 5.0 article and video were handled by 2 of our non-developer contributors.