The overall article is extremely clearly written and well-diagrammed, as you'd expect from someone who writes software for test/metrology equipment. It does look pretty different from your usual web-dev retrospective, and shares more in common with "$BROWSER Internals" style articles.<p>The thesis:<p>> I recently spent some time building a browser-based signal analyzer (spectrogram + oscilloscope) as part of one of my projects. I ended up using some very modern browser APIs and technologies that I'd not worked with before, and I discovered a lot of really interesting patterns and techniques that I'd never seen before in a web app.<p>> <i>Building this application has made it clear to me that the modern web is extremely well-suited to building complex multi-threaded and graphics-intensive applications.</i>
Related:<p><i>Show HN: I've built a spectrogram analyzer web app</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35781959" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35781959</a> (19 days ago)<p><a href="https://webfft.net/dft/" rel="nofollow">https://webfft.net/dft/</a>
Being able to run an FFT on audio signal in real time in a background thread seems really cool. Not sure how feasible it is but could be the basis for speech recognition engine running in browser (I'm not expert but I know Speech detection machine learning models are trained on range of FFT derived signals) - if you can pipe the FFT output to ML endpoint you could potentially have speech to text generation running in the browser - or something like automatic closed caption generation from an incoming audio signal.
I think the biggest problem with SharedArrayBuffer is that you need to set the Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy and Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy headers for it to work at all (due to Spectre), which means you need a host or a web server where you can configure that.