From https://github.com/Lulzx/zpdf/blob/main/src/main.zig it looks like the help text cites an unimplemented "-j" option to enable multiple threads.

There is a "--parallel" option, but that is only implemented for the "bench" command.

Are you using LLMs for parts of the coding?

What's your work flow when approaching a new project like this?

Contrasted with python, which is interpreted, has a clunky runtime, minimal optimizations, and all sorts of choices that result in slow, redundant, and also slow, performance.

The price for performance is safety checks, redundancy, how badly wrong things can go, and so on.

A good compromise is luajit - you get some of the same aggressive optimizations, but in an interpreted language, with better-than-c performance but interpreted language convenience, access to low level things that can explode just as spectacularly as with zig or c, but also a beautiful language.

also, added python bindings.

If it's really better than what we had before, what does it matter how it was made? It's literally hacked together with the tools of the day (LLMs) isn't that the very hacker ethos? Patching stuff together that works in a new and useful way.

5x speed improvements on pdf text extraction might be great for some applications I'm not aware of, I wouldn't just dismiss it out of hand because the author used $robot to write the code.

Presumably the thought to make the thing in the first place and decide what features to add and not add was more important than how the code is generated?