4 ms·

FFmpeg and ZFS are projects that show that sometimes monoliths are good ;)

by nix23 4y ago

marginalia_nu 4y ago
I think sentiments such as "monoliths are bad" often start out well informed, but as time passes on and it's passed along between generations of developers, aspects such as when and why monoliths are bad gets lost until it's just some sort of universal truth that nobody bothers to question.
charcircuit 4y ago
ffmpeg is one of the most hacky command line tool and library. The way the library is made has so many leaky abstractions from the fact it was ripped out of the command line tool. Making a replacement that had a well designed library and a separate CLI that uses that library would be much better than what monolithic has offered.
- minusf 4y ago
  out of curiosity, do you know about any project that deals with so many functionalities across so many formats, exposed mainly thru CLI and it's not hacky and leaky at places?
  - yakubin 4y ago
    Maybe pandoc?
  - anovikov 4y ago
    Most of ffmpeg functionality is extremely hard to use from a command line; my frequent kind of a custom development project is "help me enhance/optimise this PHP application using ffmpeg" (shows something that spits ffmpeg command line, two screens worth of it) => ending up writing a C app that does same stuff with libav* directly, sometimes app ending up smaller than original PHP code...
  - megous 4y ago
    In the same category, gstreamer is perhaps cleaner than ffmpeg
    - rapsey 4y ago
      Gstreamer vs ffmpeg is like microservices vs monolith. With similar problems. Microservices look nice in theory. Unfortunately they turn out to be highly complex to manage. Gstreamer is way more complex to use than it appears at first glance and connecting various filters often fails for reasons hard to understand and requires hours of fiddling to get it to work.
  - pellucide 4y ago
    Linux kernel, llvm, gcc. The work to make the cli streamlined is substantial, but examples exist
  - enos_feedler 4y ago
    Docker
- kierank 4y ago
  Multimedia isn't something that is easily represented on a CLI.

FFmpeg and ZFS are projects that show that sometimes monoliths are good ;)

by nix23 4y ago

FFmpeg and ZFS are projects that show that sometimes monoliths are good ;)

I think sentiments such as "monoliths are bad" often start out well informed, but as time passes on and it's passed along between generations of developers, aspects such as when and why monoliths are bad gets lost until it's just some sort of universal truth that nobody bothers to question.

charcircuit 4y ago

ffmpeg is one of the most hacky command line tool and library. The way the library is made has so many leaky abstractions from the fact it was ripped out of the command line tool. Making a replacement that had a well designed library and a separate CLI that uses that library would be much better than what monolithic has offered.

minusf 4y ago
out of curiosity, do you know about any project that deals with so many functionalities across so many formats, exposed mainly thru CLI and it's not hacky and leaky at places?
- yakubin 4y ago
  Maybe pandoc?
- anovikov 4y ago
  Most of ffmpeg functionality is extremely hard to use from a command line; my frequent kind of a custom development project is "help me enhance/optimise this PHP application using ffmpeg" (shows something that spits ffmpeg command line, two screens worth of it) => ending up writing a C app that does same stuff with libav* directly, sometimes app ending up smaller than original PHP code...
- megous 4y ago
  In the same category, gstreamer is perhaps cleaner than ffmpeg
  - rapsey 4y ago
    Gstreamer vs ffmpeg is like microservices vs monolith. With similar problems. Microservices look nice in theory. Unfortunately they turn out to be highly complex to manage. Gstreamer is way more complex to use than it appears at first glance and connecting various filters often fails for reasons hard to understand and requires hours of fiddling to get it to work.
- pellucide 4y ago
  Linux kernel, llvm, gcc. The work to make the cli streamlined is substantial, but examples exist
- enos_feedler 4y ago
  Docker
kierank 4y ago
Multimedia isn't something that is easily represented on a CLI.