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Comment by bushbaba | Hacker News Reader

Maybe with LLMs a full rewrite that’s more secure could be done

LLM and full rewrite are a recipe for cooking something that still has flaws but also doesn't work that well. The root cause is that PDF is an old format from a more innocent era. A new document standard that keeps up with the technical and security advances, learns about the lessons PDF taught us, and allows for easy conversion from old PDFs, would be the ideal solution.

Who am I kidding, I think the PDF format will outlive us.

> PDF is an old format from a more innocent era

if apple parsed pdf with (js, swift, rust) none of this would be possible. the problem is memory-unsafe code.

> if apple parsed pdf with (js, swift, rust) none of this would be possible

Interpreters and compilers can have bugs. Bugs can cause memory safety issues.

Since when was javascript memory safe

Since it was created.

Why is it we didn't rewrite coreutils in js a decade ago instead of waiting for rust

Because it’s a high-level interpreted language. Still memory-safe!

Rust is interesting because it’s a low-level language with strong memory safety. That makes it a good fit for projects like coreutils. I’d argue it makes it a bad fit for many other projects that get rewritten in it, though. Not everything actually needs to be in a low-level language with compile-time memory management.

A full rewrite of what? iOS? I hope you’re kidding

Apple can rewrite the media and PDF libraries in no time in Swift/Rust, they have tons of money to waste.

In no time? What are you talking about? It’d take months even with llms for it to be fully polished and tested if they started now.

If anybody has the resources to do it, tho, they do

They have the means, they have the motivation

Lately they have fewer and fewer excuses not to

That is magic thinking and even religious

The reality is Apple has been working on rewriting bits and pieces in Swift.

That is essentially "in no time" on Apple's release cadence.

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