Live data from Hacker News

Wuffs: Wrangling Untrusted File Formats Safely

github.com

71–73 of 73 posts

Re: Wuffs: Wrangling Untrusted File Formats Safely

#71
I have a question about this. Why is wuffs considered to be safe? In this thread I saw a code example from cpp using wuffs, which seems to the a C library accessed from cpp in that example. Why should I trust that C library to be safe or safer than other libs?

Re: Wuffs: Wrangling Untrusted File Formats Safely

#73
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pdfs are really really hard. the only viewer that parses them semi-correctly is ... Acrobat Reader. try to ever read any code for PDFs and see all the horrors. Google gave up and just bought the code from foxit.

Google was never trying to write PDF reader from scratch so they never "gave up". They just bought foxit code to save years of development when they wanted to ship PDF reader in Chrome. Your comment about "the only viewer that is semi-correct" is also wildly off the mark. Parsing correctly written PDF files is hard but multiple engines can do it correctly. Parsing real life PDFs is much harder then correctly implemen…

OK. In one of my previous jobs, I needed to auto-fill PDF forms on BE (among other things with PDFs), the only thing that worked reliably across PDFs was Acrobat. I did not try SummatraPDF.

edit: it seems Summatra doesn't support PDF forms? Either AcroForms or XFA forms?

Post reply on HN