OpenAniDB Lives Again!

So, as you may or may not know, I once wrote a tool called OpenAniDB as an interface to the excellent AniDB, a massive anime database. My tool was designed to take care of what I saw as three big problems with the main offline tool, AOM.

1. AOM takes a long time to start up, and takes up a ridiculous amount of RAM. This was not something I appreciated.
2. AOM was Windows-only, written in Delphi. I'm on Linux, and while Wine can run AOM, it's even slower than it is on Windows. Not ideal.
3. AOM's source isn't opened, so I can't fix the problems that I experience with it. Worse, its maintainers need to keep it closed in order to prevent server abuse and are very slow coders, so any bugs stay unresolved for long periods of time.

My answer was OpenAniDB. Written in Python, it tackled the second two problems just by existing. Problem #1 was solved by writing file-hashing code that capped itself at a 10MB memory limit instead of the 100+MB used by AOM.

But, I stopped writing it a while back, due to lack of demand. I didn't want to write and maintain a tool that nobody used. However, the project lives again. I've already revived the code base in C++, and this time around it will be much less hackish and overall more structured.

Since the Subversion at AniDB is low-volume, I will be fully documenting each commit I do, since each one should be jam-packed with bug-squishing goodness.

~ C.