Comment by fngjdflmdflg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fngjdflmdflg | Hacker News Reader

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The startup speed for this app is really good. From my quick testing it seems like it is as fast or slightly faster than npp. I am surprised that QT can be that fast. I recall this line from the Sumatra PDF developer on why he chose win32 only:

>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.[0]

To be fair, a PDF reader and a notepad editor are two different things, and startup speed is only one metric which is the only one I tested. But I always assumed npp was also using win32 APIs only for similar reasons. (I don't actualy know what GUI toolkit npp uses.) And "bloated" could perhaps mean a lot of things. Perhaps QT takes more memory or something. But I always assumed npp's unbeatable speed was due to native APIs.

[0] https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/2f72237a4230410a888acbfc...

Performance is not an issue with Qt. He probably means the framework is too large and complicated from a developer perspective. The compiled code is fast.

I think Krzysztof's objection was mainly about size (memory/disk). He set pretty high standards for SumatraPDF in that regard. The full statically linked executable is only 8MB, while the Qt Core and UI libraries by themselves are larger than that, and that is before you start talking about dependencies like the 20MB ICU data.

Came here to say the same thing. Qt is a C++ library and is widely used (for example in KDE) and is also used in embedded environments a lot. And its pretty mature.

Sumatra is such an awesome piece of software, small, fast, almost entirely bug-free, incredible load speeds for large pdfs... my Linux alternative is Evince, which does about the same

GTK+ 3 and 4 are quite visually ugly, but you can get Windows classic-styled themes for both (from Chicago95 and B00merang project respectively) that will make them far more usable.

I will never understand how someone can call GTK4 ugly, as it actually gets general spacing correct unlike 90% of QT projects out there.

Do those themes mimic the Windows look or do they ask Win32 to draw butons, windows, menus, etc...?

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