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A comment on Atom now opens files larger than 2MB. Parent comment

Re:Atom now opens files larger than 2MB by nightski on Wednesday June 10, 2015 @05:59AM (#9690925)
Sorry, it's not obvious at all how the limit came about. That is pretty terrible.
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Re:Atom now opens files larger than 2MB by mseebach on Wednesday June 10, 2015 @08:38AM (#9691612)
It is obvious to me: I think they chose to load, parse, prettify, colour etc. and keep the entire file into an in-memory data structure, which is easy to reason about, and totally reasonable for "human sized" data. However, for arbitrary sized files, you need a mechanism for leaving most of the file in a raw state - that's harder (but not impossible, obviously).

So, it makes sense to me that they would assume only "human sized" data (and expect users to use another tool for looking at large files, "do one thing well" and all that) and opt for a slightly simpler programming model. Apparently, they decided that the assumption was wrong, and so changed the model.

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Re:Atom now opens files larger than 2MB by manigandham on Wednesday June 10, 2015 @06:18AM (#9690995)
Atom is a desktop/native wrapper around browser-like internals. The stuff inside is all just HTML/javascript/css running on node. There are some neat advantages, as well as just seeing how far a web interface for a desktop app can go.

The limit came about because trying to open a 100MB file as an html page (even without all the extra styling and interactive options) will break any browser. It was just a hard problem to solve, having an HTML-based editor deal with so much text at once.

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Re:Atom now opens files larger than 2MB by userbinator on Wednesday June 10, 2015 @06:34AM (#9691047)
The limit came about because trying to open a 100MB file as an html page (even without all the extra styling and interactive options) will break any browser.

I remember opening HTML files in that size range (they were logs) in IE6 around a decade or more ago, on a machine with <1GB of RAM, and it handled them just fine - there was a noticeable delay, but it wasn't unusable. Even searching for strings worked.

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Re:Atom now opens files larger than 2MB by rplnt on Wednesday June 10, 2015 @06:28AM (#9691018)
> trying to open a 100MB file as an html page (even without all the extra styling and interactive options) will break any browser.

I'd love to test that. Anyone willing to privide an example file? HTML with css perhaps, no js. Should be pretty small when zipped.

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Re:Atom now opens files larger than 2MB by icebraining on Wednesday June 10, 2015 @06:37AM (#9691060)
Assuming you don't need anything complex, it's pretty easy to generate it.

Here's a 100MB HTML file (compressed to 300KB): https://curl.io/get/yt7zbmfq/0eb1564f570236acf1d9f304855a7c7...

As a side note, VIM opens it in an instant /troll

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