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Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

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Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#171

Post by dadoum »

anta40 wrote: post #62

>> The only way for one person to even attempt cross-platform app is to use a UI abstraction layer like Qt, WxWidgets or Gtk. The problem is that Gtk is ugly, Qt is extremely bloated and WxWidgets barely works. So, how you are going to write cross platform apps, then? :D

You can implement the frontend separately for each platform, which is used by example by usbimager, Transmission or SciTE.

This is very hard to do in practice for any big enough software, but then using Qt, Java or C# frameworks is probably worth it since their impact will start to be small compared to your application footprint.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#172

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

piokoch wrote: post #144

I have open a few bigger PDF files with Sumatra. It is insanely fast, it starts insanely fast. Or maybe Sumatra is just normal, we got used to dealing with crappy, slow, bloated software "because RAM and CPU is cheap" and forgot that stuff can work so good.

Exactly like all the slow software built on React Native.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#173

Post by rwalle »

DeathArrow wrote: post #126

Wow, someone that didn't use Electron for writing desktop apps? Focus on speed and simplicity? Basically every app should be like this.

Yeah, "should", when every app developer decides that they should use Win32 API.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#174

Post by rwalle »

Very interesting article. Has a lot of good, practical points. But I cannot help but wondering -- the author keeps saying "This is my project so I can do what I think is the best choice", but how many of these principles would break down if the original authors stop maintaining this, and other people take over/fork the project? The I can totally understand why the author created their own JSON/XML parser, but another person may consider it too complex/not practical/no longer worth the effort and instead replace it with a small library. What happens from there?

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#175

Post by pcdevils »

hulitu wrote: post #158
pcdevils wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the push to use the browsers pdf engine was a result of Adobe acrobat being an endless festival of security bugs. Loading it in the browser allows them to reuse the same sandboxing. Pretty good idea for most folk. I like sumatrapdf because it keeps track of the pdfs I have open and the page. Like having an ebook reader on windows that doesn't suck.

> Part of the push to use the browsers pdf engine was a result of Adobe acrobat being an endless festival of security bugs. The browsers are also "an endless festival of security bugs." Especially since they started to execute remote code. I can't view pdfs in browser. I need to zoom, find, and copy parts of (electronical schematics) pdfs and the browser version just sucks.

Agreed. I still use acrobat for form filling and this one for the rest
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