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In 2020, most people's only device is a cellphone.

They can't easily run ghostscript directly, and making a web service is easier than making an app (recompiling ghostscript for all CPU architectures, ...) despite the ongoing hosting costs.



I feel like the right answer to that is to make ghostscript run on a cell phone. I mean... we're already on Darwin or Linux; the userland is weird, but ex. Termux and iSH proves that you absolutely can run a lot of packages all the same. So in my mind, the real question is: Why does the porting and app development experience suck so much? I mean... HyperCard, in 1987, was usable by non-programmers. A/UX had Commando in 1995, which wrapped CLI in a nice GUI. To hear people rant, the height of RAD GUI building was Visual Basic 5 (1997) or VB6 (1998). Have we really lost that much in the ensuing 25 years?


Not just hosting costs. Energy costs. Destruction to our planet.

That is also in addition to sending your documents to who knows who.

You can probably compile ghostscript to javascript via emscripten or similar. I am not sure what this means for its AGPL license.

But maybe this is more a discussion for that other thread.


> You can probably compile ghostscript to javascript via emscripten or similar. I am not sure what this means for its AGPL license.

Shouldn't be any "worse" than running it server-side, since AGPL exists in order to apply to SaaS.




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