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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

>soft real time piece of code for use in the browser

Maybe you should reconsider.

My definitions:

    * hard real time: people will die or things will be destroyed if a certain block of code is not executed within N msecs of something happening

    * soft real time: nobody will die but things only really work correctly if a certain block of code is not executed within N msecs of something happening

Why anyone would think that a web browser (equipped with whatever VM abstractions you care to name) is a suitable platform for even soft real time is completely beyond me.

I write soft real time for a living (a multiplatform DAW). We have to go to great lengths to ensure performance, and we do things that you will NEVER(1) be able to do in a browser.

(1) for any reasonable definition of NEVER

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That sounds overly dramatic to me. I'm writing a DAW of sorts for the browser, and while I wouldn't use it on stage, it works well enough to produce music on. I didn't even add AudioWorklet support yet, and I will probably release without it and consider it if users complain about stutters etc.

Have you tested on a variety of platforms? In my experience, some are very good about this (e.g Chrome on macOS) and some are a common source of problems (e.g. Firefox on Linux, at least with PulseAudio).

It seems to work well on the popular platforms (chrome, safari, ios, android) although I haven't tried linux yet. Wasm performance can vary between browsers though, which will impact the experience a lot.

"DAW of sorts"

Obviously, one can do music creation and audio processing in a browser.

The parameters that matter are what N is in the "N msecs" I mentioned above, how much audio (e.g. tracks) and how much processing (i.e. DSP).

When you make N small enough, make the track count large enough, and do enough DSP, it's never going to work inside a browser (it sometimes won't work outside the browser).

If N is large enough, the track count small enough and/or there's not too much DSP going on .... have fun!

It is a MIDI application that is only useful when delivered via the web. I don't have much choice there. So yes, it is a hard path. But then again, if I can get it to work then it will be a very neat little project. So for now I'll just stoically plod through and try to eliminate each of the little gotcha's one-by-one.

But the ease with which apparent guarantees are tossed around by browser documentation (with regards to time) only to see them solidly trashed in real life is depressing.

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