[spencerflem]

I've been trying to understand it for a while now, it seems very cool.

Best short answer I have is that it's a lot of things working together. At it's core there's an IPC interface that's geared towards real time audio/video and an event loop that's scriptable in Lua that can read frames, process them, and then draw it to the screen.

This lets you do cool things like having parts of the frame drawn by another process, or on another computer seamlessly. And its more secure to punt things like codec processing on another thread anyways since those are common targets for exploits. Plus, the scripting ability makes it very easy to intercept streams and modify them as you please.

There's more to it, I recommend the blog, it has a fun sort of zen riddle tone that I personally like a lot. This article is my favorite: https://arcan-fe.com/2021/09/20/arcan-as-operating-system-de...