from Hacker News

That Time I Recreated Photoshop in C++

by f055 on 3/15/25, 6:22 PM with 144 comments

• by mrandish on 3/16/25, 3:18 PM

  > "It followed a set of five rules to benefit the end user: no installers, no archives, no registry keys, no additional runtimes and a single executable file."

  Reading this sentence made me feel warm and happy. I get why the registry exists and things work the way they do today around the Windows software ecosystem but... damn, I really miss the days when most desktop software was more like this. These days I try to use portable installs whenever they're available, I just wish it was more common. The time, inconvenience and uncertainty I'll be able to fully restore all my preferences makes me actively avoid reinstalling Windows.

• by chpatrick on 3/16/25, 2:31 PM

  Photoshop has a million features though, a couple of image filters doesn't really count as recreating.

• by dingdingdang on 3/16/25, 6:14 PM

  Let's get a direct link to this beauty in place:

  https://github.com/f055/fedit-image-editor

• by 90s_dev on 3/16/25, 7:12 PM

  > But I didn’t promote it. A few months later, I landed a C++ job. So in the end all that effort paid off.

  It's interesting how instinctively we know our hard work deserves to be paid off, but it's a shame how often open source developers put hard work into code that never really gets paid off, especially when it's widely used in production. I guess this explains why so often they look for reputation credits, or why NPM added the "maybe you should donate to the authors of these libs" feature, or why GitHub built in Patreon. There's got to be a better model than what we have now, that doesn't take advantage of naive but hard working young thinkers.

• by brulard on 3/16/25, 6:16 PM

  There was a project called "pixel32" and later "Pixel Studio Pro" in the early 2000s. It looked really nice and was sold as early access. But became vaporware, people that paid became really pissed and the guy creating it turned from hero to villain quickly.

  https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/pixel-studio-pro-in-past-call...

• by StefanBatory on 3/16/25, 3:45 PM

  Author of this article said he finished at Warsaw University of Technology - it was always considered to be one of the better ones here.

  That being said, what also strikes me is how different the thesis were back in times. I did mine recently in another university of technology in some bigger city (without wanting to dox myself that much) and 90% of our engineering theses were of very subpar quality; mine included.

• by vijucat on 3/17/25, 12:02 PM

  This is why I love Windows. There is a TON of small, open source software that serves a niche. Used to browse sourceforge.net and freshmeat (is that what it was called?) to find them!

• by nailer on 3/16/25, 3:46 PM

  A friend from Phonegap got acquired by Adobe a decade ago and ported Photoshop to JavaScript for entertainment purposes immediately afterwards.

• by pacifika on 3/16/25, 5:04 PM

  The things people make and not tell the world about. Glad it’s on GitHub, this is so impressive.

• by NotAnOtter on 3/17/25, 8:51 PM

  Photoshop is a stretch.. that's more like MS paint in terms of feature parity.

• by DeathArrow on 3/17/25, 6:02 AM

  In my experience, when developing software the hard part is implementing the actual logic, not the UI.

  In this case, replicating Photoshops UI seemed to be the hardest. Maybe using something like MFC, Qt, C++ Builder instead of straight Win API would have been easier.

  I remember a long time ago when I was in high-school and tried to implement a paint program under DOS, that had windows using Borland C++ and BGI graphics library. How hard should it be to implement windows, buttons and dialogs, I thought? After all, with the power of OOP and C++, every problem is easy to solve, I thought.

• by aa_is_op on 3/16/25, 3:55 PM

  Did it crash every 30 minutes?

  If not, how much are you selling it for?

• by DidYaWipe on 3/17/25, 5:26 AM

  "Straight from my previous project named Fiew I added a massive image library viewer. It really could quickly and easily scroll through massive amounts of pictures."

  Which is now infuriatingly lacking in the entire domain of image editors. Thumbnail browsers used to be an expected feature of image editors, even shareware ones. Now? Fat chance. Good luck even finding a stand-alone one.

  Recently one called FlowVision surfaced for Mac, and it's pretty much the lightweight browser that many of us have been looking for for years. It has some rough spots, but the developer is responsive to issues. https://github.com/netdcy/FlowVision

• by theodric on 3/16/25, 8:16 PM

  Slick. Runs pretty well under Wine!

• by echelon on 3/16/25, 4:02 PM

  It looks like you could have sold licenses to this or gone the startup route. Might have been slower and less glamorous than the gig you wound up getting, though.

  The UX looks simple and reasonable. Frankly better than Gimp.

  Really cool work!

• by enigma101 on 3/18/25, 3:54 AM

  no you didn't

• by ArkimPhiri on 3/17/25, 12:56 PM

  oh you did?

• by promoterr on 3/17/25, 11:17 AM

  umm, what's wrong with: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/ ? Adobe is out-of-everything for decades..