In my previous post, I alluded to an exciting development for PipeWire. I’m now thrilled to officially announce that Asymptotic will be undertaking several important tasks for the project, thanks to funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund (now part of the Sovereign Tech Agency).
Some of you might be familiar with the Sovereign Tech Fund from their funding for GNOME, GStreamer and systemd – they have been investing in foundational open source technology, supporting the digital commons in key areas, a mission closely aligned with our own.
We will be tackling three key areas of work.
ASHA hearing aid support
I wrote a bit about our efforts on this front. We have already completed the PipeWire support for single ASHA hearing aids, and are actively working on support for stereo pairs.
Improvements to GStreamer elements
We have been working through the GStreamer+PipeWire todo list, fixing bugs and making it easier to build audio and video streaming pipelines on top of PipeWire. A number of usability improvements have already landed, and more work on this front continues
A Rust-based client library
While we have a pretty functional set of Rust bindings around the C-based libpipewire already, we will be creating a pure Rust implementation of a PipeWire client, and provide that via a C API as well.
There are a number of advantages to this: type and memory safety being foremost, but we can also leverage Rust macros to eliminate a lot of boilerplate (there are community efforts in this direction already that we may be able to build upon).
This is a large undertaking, and this funding will allow us to tackle a big chunk of it – we are excited, and deeply appreciative of the work the Sovereign Tech Agency is doing in supporting critical open source infrastructure.
Watch this space for more updates!