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

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131–136 of 136 posts

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

#131
post #106

Upvoted for a number of interesting and unconventional opinions. Rolling your own JSON, XML, etc parsers raises some eyebrows. I guess it's sort of okay if you expect to only be reading your local config files versus arbitrary web content. Maybe then it's okay to trade off raw speed for not handing a ton of formatting and syntax edge cases. Writing GUI apps against the native framework. Yup, it'll be a major pain to…

Regarding the XML thing the author did mention later how complex a compliant parser is, so presumably tests have been… done. The “HTML/” before the XML is what really raised my eyebrows with the stuff, since not many people besides browsers implement the optional tag and tag soup recovery right. (At least it’s standardized in the spec now.)

Alright, looks like the self-brewed parser is explicitly for CHM HTML4 and EPUB XHTML only, with the more serious stuff in muPDF. I could still mess with it by self-packing CHM (HTML4 has optional tags for ergonomics too), but that sounds very boring.

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

#133
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "spirit of SumatraPDF" means that he wouldn't npm install 800K lines of code into his project 5 minutes after creating it. I look at the speed and efficiency of VSCode and it gives me hope that it's possible to write the high quality programs that we're used to from C/C++ using web technologies. It's just that right now we don't have enough good programmers creating good programs to incentivize the others to…

VS Code is neither fast nor efficient. I'm not hating on it as I like it more than most Electron apps, but I use it on a laptop with a Core 2 Duo P8600 CPU (among other things) and it's pretty sluggish.

It's impressive that it barely works on C2D P8600.

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

#134
post #106

Upvoted for a number of interesting and unconventional opinions. Rolling your own JSON, XML, etc parsers raises some eyebrows. I guess it's sort of okay if you expect to only be reading your local config files versus arbitrary web content. Maybe then it's okay to trade off raw speed for not handing a ton of formatting and syntax edge cases. Writing GUI apps against the native framework. Yup, it'll be a major pain to…

I think writing a JSON parser should be perfectly fine, it's quite a simple format (while imperfect and probably way overused). I would say 50 lines of header + 500 lines of .cpp file should be plenty to write a solid reusable implementation that parses to a generic tree (dicts, lists, float/string/bool literals). Should be doable in an afternoon. But if you disagree, you should try a particular, very popular JSON li…

I don't think full size of the git clone is relevant information. You can always do a shallow clone.

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

#135
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think writing a JSON parser should be perfectly fine, it's quite a simple format (while imperfect and probably way overused). I would say 50 lines of header + 500 lines of .cpp file should be plenty to write a solid reusable implementation that parses to a generic tree (dicts, lists, float/string/bool literals). Should be doable in an afternoon. But if you disagree, you should try a particular, very popular JSON li…

I don't think full size of the git clone is relevant information. You can always do a shallow clone.

I think your statement that it doesn't matter is kind of making my point.

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

#136
post #44
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paint.NET is great, too. It's not open source, unfortunately (for valid if regrettable reasons), but it's free as in free beer. The memory of its GUI makes me sigh a little whenever I open GIMP.

I use photopea.com. It's a Photoshop clone but loads much faster and works great for when you don't need some of the newest / cutting edge PS features and don't work with large files.

The developer did an AMA. He makes a decent living off it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9urjmg/i_made_a_free_...

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