> Apparently GUI frontend is not a subject or problem that interests him. He lives and thinks close to the metal, at a lower layer of abstraction.

It's not that cut and dried. The application I work on has some notable chunks of assembly code, lots of tricky multithreaded realtime lock free code involving threads, atomics, RCU and more ... and ... a GUI that lets the user continuously interact with it.

Oh, and we use ffmpeg for video decoding/encoding :)