Weblog Without Honor or Humanity

I’ve released version 0.7 of Sumatra PDF viewer. Changes in this release:

• added ability to select the text and copy it to clipboard - contributed by Tomek Weksej
• made it multi-lingual (13 translations contributed by many people)
• added Save As option
• list of recently opened files is updated immediately
• fixed .pdf extension registration on Vista
• added ability to compile as DLL and C# sample application - contributed by Valery Possoz
• mingw compilation fixes and project files for CodeBlocks - contributed by MrChuoi
• fixed a few crashes
• moved the sources to Google Code project hosting

Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 has just been released so I decided to compare the quality of C++ code generation compared to Visual Studio 2005.

I’m very disappointed. I was expecting an improvement but what I can observe is rather large degradation.

My test is simple: I compiled a release version of my Sumatra PDF viewer on both Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and compared the size of generated executable. I assume that the compilation flags are the same (I let VS 2008 upgrade my 2005 project).

The size of the binary went from 1.99 MB to 2.39 MB which is a huge 20% increase.

That’s just awful. Official release notes for VS 2008 focus mostly on various .NET improvements and are silent about improvements to C++, so I wasn’t expecting much but I was certainly not expecting such degradation in the size of generated executables.

When I have some time I should compare *.map files to see why exactly such a big difference. I’m statically linking C++ runtime, so maybe the size increase comes from that. Not that it would be any consolation - I’m force to statically link because C++ runtime from VS 2005 is not available on all machines, which means I would have to re-distribute it with my app, which goes against my goal of having just one executable.

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time merging files (I need to merge translation files for Sumatra PDF that people send me) so a good merging tools is valuable.
On Windows, there are at least 3 good diff/merge tools.

Araxis Merge is a really nice but expensive.

WinMerge is token open-source product. It’s not as flashy as Araxis Merge but in some ways it’s better (more key bindings that speedup merging). I’ve used it with great success for merging source code but for dealing with translations it has deal-breaking limitation: it doesn’t support utf-8 encoded text.

And the winner is: DiffMerge, which has been recently re-released with the price of $0. It might be not as flashy as Araxis Merge, but it has good merge workflow and support utf-8 encoded text.