(I also wouldn't be surprised if they had even more memory copies than they let on, marshalling between the GC-backed JS runtime to the GC-backed Python runtime.)
I was coming back to HN to include in my comment a link to various high-performance IPC libraries, but another commenter already beat me linking to iceoryx2 (though of course they'd need to use a python extension).
SHM for IPC has been well-understood as the better option for high-bandwidth payloads from the 1990s and is a staple of Win32 application development for communication between services (daemons) and clients (guis).
On the outside we can’t be sure. But it’s possible that they took the right decision to go with a naïve implementation first. Then profile, measure and improve later.
But yes the hole idea of running a headless web browser to get run JavaScript to get access to a video stream is a bit crazy. But I guess that’s just the world we are in.
> I don't mean to be dismissive, but this would have been caught very early on (in the planning stages) by anyone that had/has experience in system-level development rather than full-stack web js/python development
The product is not a full-stack web application. What makes you think that they brought in people with that kind of experience just for this particular feature?
Especially when they claim that they chose that route because it was what was most convenient. While you might argue that wasn't the right tradeoff, it is a common tradeoff developers of all kinds make. “Make It Work, Make It Right, Make It Fast” has become pervasive in this industry, for better or worse.