I wish I read more things like this on hn.
"We wanted to know and understand every line of code being run on our hardware, and it should be designed for the exact hardware we wanted"
But that statement seems at odds with a dependency on the enormous WebRTC AudioProcessing C++ module. But then they also say they don't use WebRTC so maybe I misunderstand what's going on.
We moved away from WebRTC completely for video, networking, and some audio. We still use webrtc-audio-processing for acoustic-echo-cancellation and some other niceties. Here is our Rust wrapper for that library:
I mean you could also have the "we used commodity everything, where first to market but the next folks did it better and cheaper because they could" posts - hindsight is 20/20.
I bet IBM didn't expect using off the shelf components would mean that the IBM PC was the standard for the next 30 years and it wouldn't be theirs.
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As someone who works at a company that relied heavily on video conferencing (half the devs off shore) - every single major solution absolutely sucks, they are flaky, unreliable, sound quality is poor, video rate is poor (and this is with fat pipes at both ends) and worst of all latency, latency when trying to have a round table conversation with people remotely is horrific, it is good to see someone pushing the limits, Skype et al haven't gotten much better in the last decade yet my internet connection at home/work is x50 times faster and even mid range business laptops have much improved graphics grunt.
That's just one of their dependencies. It's possible to know every line without rewriting. And it's possible to rewrite and still not know every line.
They seem to strike a reasonable balance.