u/Bubbly_Ad_9270

Built a native offline manhwa/comic reader in pure C with cimgui — handles 100k+ items, infinite scrolling.

I’m pretty new to the manhwa/comic ecosystem, so I started building my own offline reader for PC mainly as a personal project.

The entire application is written in C, and the GUI is built using cimgui. The final executable is statically linked and UPX-compressed, and currently stays under 2MB.

Some things I focused on:

  • Smooth infinite scrolling
  • Very large libraries
  • Low memory usage
  • Fast image loading
  • Offline-first design

For testing, I scraped 18k+ images from online sources and generated a CBZ collection of 232 chapters from The Beginning After the End. Even at that size, scrolling remains smooth with no noticeable lag.

The reader currently supports:

  • CBZ / CBR
  • PDFs
  • ZIP archives
  • Image folders
  • Website-based backends

Since I’m still new to this space, I’d love feedback from both C developers and comic/manhwa readers about features, architecture ideas, or performance improvements worth exploring.

u/Bubbly_Ad_9270 — 5 days ago