from Hacker News

We Built a C++ Rendering Engine for the Web

by PetrBrzyBrzek on 7/8/21, 10:14 AM with 45 comments

• by flakiness on 7/10/21, 1:16 PM

  Parsing proprietary, undocumented formats and turn it a universal format, and render it? That sounds like a kind of an ambition which is never realized, but they did. And this kind of project tends to fail because it's filled with boring tasks with unreasonable corner cases. So congrats!

  And according to their page [1], they've been doing this for a decade. This is such an accomplishment.

  [1] https://www.notion.so/The-Story-of-Avocode-d96c279b270443f88...

• by bckr on 7/10/21, 3:09 PM

  I love reading about projects like this. They are in a class of projects that are 100% slog and not very sexy but make things a lot better for a lot of people.

  Better outputs for more inputs in better time. Beautiful.

  Reminds me of Photopea... Oh, I wonder whether they are in competition? Probably not since Photopea seems to be more about image editing and Avocode is more about design and handoff.

• by gfxgirl on 7/10/21, 3:42 PM

  "the notoriously opaque Photoshop format"

  what? it's well been documented for ever. 2nd hit on google

  https://www.adobe.com/devnet-apps/photoshop/fileformatashtml...

• by mwkaufma on 7/10/21, 8:03 PM

  Isn't that just... A browser?

• by aliasEli on 7/8/21, 12:23 PM

  I really don't think it was a good idea to write this in C++ for security reasons. It accepts external inputs in some complex formats, and they also have a web server version. This makes it highly vulnerable to all kind of attacks, such as buffer overflows.