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zhxiaoliangon Native all the way, until you need text

I understand your pain. That’s why I’ve ported my VMPrint layout engine to Rust. It’s early, but it already shows promising performance improvements over the original TypeScript-based engine, which is already very fast. The Rust version can create fully paginated, publishing-grade layout at around 8,500 pages (or 2,000,000 words) per second on a M4 MacBook. It’s even faster at advanced tasks like mixing texts with irregular exclusion fields. The TS version can do it under 1ms, but I don’t have a measure yet for the Rust version. Unfortunately, people have shown little interest in this kind of components, so I’m no longer inspired to release it in its raw form like I did with VMPrint. My plan is to use it to build a native markdown editor first to test it more fully and just to have fun with it, LOL.

zhxiaoliangon Show HN: I built a free PDF editor to fix Claude's horribly-generated PDFs

Really nicely done. If you like you might want to check out the VMPrint engine or its sibling project Layoutmaster. They can give your tool a serious heart transplant and take it to a totally new level.

zhxiaoliangon We've made the world too complicated

People mistake complexity for value. People hide behind complexity. Truth is simple, so it's cheap. Truth lays us bare, so we avoid it at all costs.

zhxiaoliangon Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes

Seeing these brought back a flood of memories. Logging onto AOL through GeoWorks for the first time. Clicking that tiny lit apartment window in the Macintosh mouse tutorial and watching the curtain peel back to reveal a couple dancing inside. Mesmerized by the soft shade on OS/2 buttons like they were works of art (yes, I know that’s weird). Bringing my NeXTstation into the office when I was just a lowly game tester and getting that look from my boss.

Those really were magical days.

zhxiaoliangon Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics

I’m not sure why I’d use it, but I enjoyed the visual and loved the brutalist design of the website -- it brought back some fond memories of the good old days.

zhxiaoliangon Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs

I'm always skeptical of the whole "computer use" concept. It's like hiring someone and inviting him to your house and telling him to go ahead, feel free to sleep on the bed, use the toilet, eat whatever is in the fridge, watch the TV, and oh here are the combinations for the safe... and that someone you hire is a monkey.