alt Hacker NewsDon't worry about being nice, 15 years doing open source develops a thick skin.
But you didn't respond: which language should I use?
Go didn't exist when I started SumatraPDF.
And while I write pretty much everything else in Go and love the productivity, it wouldn't be a good fit.
A big reason people like Sumatra is that it's fast and small. 10 MB (of which majority are fonts embedded in the binary) and not 100MB+ of other apps.
Go's "hello world" is 10 MB.
Plus abysmal (on Windows) interop with C / C++ code.
And the reason SumatraPDF is unportable to mac / linux is not the language but the fact that I use all the Windows API I can for the UI.
Any cross-platform UI solution pretty much require using tens of megabytes of someone else's reimplementation of all the UI widgets (Qt, GTK, Flutter) or re-implementing a smaller subset of UI using less code.
Replies
I would have recommended Go but if it increases file size, please don't. Anyways, it is very fast and quick so keep it the way it is. I can't find a reason to change it.
It can even do comments. But I would like to see more comment tools, especially measurement tools.
And since you are using Windows, do you think it would be worthwhile to add Windows OCR?
sumatrapdf not being cross platform is a great feature, maximizing the use of intended platform. win32api is great. thank you for that