~41K pages/sec peak throughput.

Key choices: memory-mapped I/O, SIMD string search, parallel page extraction, streaming output. Handles CID fonts, incremental updates, all common compression filters.

~5,000 lines, no dependencies, compiles in <2s.

Why it's fast:

  - Memory-mapped file I/O (no read syscalls)
  - Zero-copy parsing where possible
  - SIMD-accelerated string search for finding PDF structures
  - Parallel extraction across pages using Zig's thread pool
  - Streaming output (no intermediate allocations for extracted text)

  - XRef tables and streams (PDF 1.5+)
  - Incremental PDF updates (/Prev chain)
  - FlateDecode, ASCII85, LZW, RunLength decompression
  - Font encodings: WinAnsi, MacRoman, ToUnicode CMap
  - CID fonts (Type0, Identity-H/V, UTF-16BE with surrogate pairs)

the licensing is a huge blocker for using mupdf in non-OSS tools, so it's very nice to see this is MIT

python bindings would be good too

- commit message: LLM-generated.

- README: LLM-generated.

I'm not convinced that projects vibe coded over the evening deserve the HN front page…

Edit: and of course the author's blog is also full of AI slop…

2026 hasn't even started I already hate it.

  74910,74912c187768,187779
  < [Example 1: If you want to use the code conversion facetcodecvt_utf8to output tocouta UTF-8 multibyte sequence
  < corresponding to a wide string, but you don't want to alter the locale forcout, you can write something like:\237 D.27.21954
                                                                                                                                \251ISO/IECN4950wstring_convert<std::codecvt_utf8<wchar_t>> myconv;
  < std::string mbstring = myconv.to_bytes\050L"Hello\134n"\051;
  ---
  >
  > [Example 1: If you want to use the code conversion facet codecvt_utf8 to output to cout a UTF-8 multibyte sequence
  > corresponding to a wide string, but you don’t want to alter the locale for cout, you can write something like:
  >
  > § D.27.2
  > 1954
  >
  > © ISO/IEC
  > N4950
  >
  > wstring_convert<std::codecvt_utf8<wchar_t>> myconv;
  > std::string mbstring = myconv.to_bytes(L"Hello\n");