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author here: I have zero experience with Visual Studio API, and honestly, looking at what a giant and slow mess VS became, I would not even try it :)

But providing a standalone desktop/terminal version is on the list.

Hi, it would not be hard at all, at the moment for me it would be like 1 day of work. Honestly, I just don't see its benefit, you can always open it on a dedicated browser and use it as it would be a desktop app.

However, in the next release I might provide a desktop version.

Show HN: NoteCalc 6 years ago

Hi, thanks :)

Why WASM:

One of the primary goal of NoteCalc is to be easily accessible (e.g. it was mainly born because Soulver is MacOS only). So the browser-based client was obvious choice, and I chosed WASM for

- performance reasons

- to be able to use rust

- to avoid as much JS (and related technologies) as possible

Why Canvas:

I answered here: https://github.com/bbodi/notecalc3/issues/6#issuecomment-749...

In a previous versions, only the changed areas were re-rendered, but the code was much more complex and error-prone, and it did not bring any performance improvement, so now I just rerender everything, still excellent performance but much simpler code. However this is different for calculations, only changed/affected lines are reparsed and recalculated.

Show HN: NoteCalc 6 years ago

Originally NoteCalc used a library for handling arbitrarily large numbers. Unfortunately, some operations were so slow that as a quick fix, I replaced the library with a lighter one without dynamic allocations (which is 96 bit integer with 28scale).

This serves well the primary goal of NoteCalc so I did not spend more time on it yet, but I am on the same page as you, and if NoteCalc will be feature-complete, I will give an other shot to arbitrarily large calculations/precision.

Show HN: NoteCalc 6 years ago

Thanks for noticing it!

Unfortunately it seems units cannot be applied to function results. It must be fixed, I noted down, thanks!

Show HN: NoteCalc 6 years ago

One of my primary design goal was something like that: "My mother should be able to use this tool to calculate/plan her vacation expenses". (My mother is older and not a tech guru you can guess :)) So the primary focus are on simple calculations with meaningful context and immediate feedback. Nothing fancy.

Though, beside that, I think it provides some nice features. E.g. the matrix creation/editing functionality was born because I could not find a simple tool to double check my rendering calculations with.

Show HN: NoteCalc 6 years ago

Thanks, you are right, I did not notice but yes it could be annoying.

The reason is that the content of the note is stored in the URL so it is easy to share it by sending the url to friends. So the URL changes basically on every modification.

I add it to the fixlist.

Show HN: NoteCalc 6 years ago

Hi, Not yet, it is on my list, but unfortunately with a low priority.

But fortunately, the whole architecture was designed with the terminal in mind: - 99% of the functionalty is implemented as a lib, and just a tiny part is responsible for input and rendering, so it is very easy to write new frontend for it. - both the rendering and the input uses characters as a basic for coordinates, so it is easy to translate the render commands generated by the lib to the terminal.