A DAW is going to be doing far more audio processing on tens or hundreds of channels simultaneously, while playing back some of the audio from disk, some from memory, some from live inputs, and also receiving, processing, and recording/playing MIDI events. And hosting both the audio and GUIs of third party plugins.

That makes sense, but what does that have to do with how GUI is implemented?

DAW's GUI needs to remain responsive with minimal and consistent latency. If DAW users complained because of DPC latency introduced by Nvidia's video driver, you can imagine how critical low-latency requirements are.

DAW can use pretty much all of system resources (RAM, CPU, disk IO) during playback. If any other thread steals CPU for for too long during playback, like GC of an UI thread, this can introduce audio clicks/pops.

Video conferencing app has tons of network latency which helps to hide other latencies. That kind of latency would be unacceptable in a DAW. Video conferencing app also doesn't starve system of resources like DAW can, so it's UI can be more resource-intensive.

> This is in production right now as far as I know and adds very little latency.

How much? As GP said, > 5ms is instant disqualification. And that is for your whole app, not just the effects pipeline.

GP is right, go use a DAW in a serious setting for a while to build up an intuition of the needs of these users.

How is audio processing relevant to how you build the GUI?

I have not heard a single argument why DAW software can not have a web GUI. Do you have any? I'm genuinely curious.

There have been various toy DAWs the have web GUIs. I've never seen a production-capable DAW with a web GUI.

I suspect that existing web-as-native-GUI frameworks make presumptions about threading that won't work where a realtime audio callback thread piping data to other audio processing threads and back is the real show, and where the GUI may need things like updated zoom levels dirtying many waveform drawings at once requiring recalculation of peak values in viewable windows to draw the little lines that make the waveform, among other things that may make simple partitioning of systems more challenging...

> This is in production right now as far as I know and adds very little latency.

You're not running 20 different tracks with compression, reverb, chorus, delay + send/return tracks + sub mixes in your app. Your app has absolutely nothing to do with a DAW. You're not taking MIDI input or running virtual instruments either. Try to do that in a browser with a latency < 10ms like Cubase or Logic and see how it goes.

Again, your product has absolutely nothing to do with a DAW and its constraints, so don't try to claim it's an achievement of some sort.

I'm not sure how any of this is relevant with regards to how you build your GUI. If you have special requirements that require you to do your audio processing in native code using low level system sound APIs then there is nothing preventing you from doing so while still building web based GUI on top of it.

I'm not sure how any of your video app doing some light sound processing is relevant to the performance required for a DAW at first place either.

> This is in production right now as far as I know and adds very little latency.

Latency in a DAW isn't just at a premium, it's configurable and needs to be reported and compensated for. That means if any audio processing adds latency, all other processing units must compensate with their own internal (or external) delays to avoid the signal going out of phase.

What do you think happens with multiple audio and video streams in a video conferencing use case?

Apart from that, I don't see how any of this is relevant to how you build the GUI for a DAW.