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Maybe I missed something on the methodology, but I have a question regarding justification of designing a complete new tool.

The article mentions "ImageMagick is slow because it does a lot more than just extract image size". So we implemented a complete new solution.

How about: "We added to ImageMagick a new command to just extract image size". So we published a small patch to Imagemagick, and got it done much faster than creating a complete new tool. On top of that, reusing tested Imagemagick data structure would probably reduce a lot maintenance cost.

Maybe I did not see some subtleties ?

this is written entirely in javascript. If all you need is to get an image size, then installing imagemagick is overkill
I see. So this is a "fast javascript implementation to retrieve size of {image, pdf}" And since process is a small task with many calls, it would be costly to call an external process (imagemagik) using native code.
The overhead of shell calls in Node was a big reason why we avoided trying to patch ImageMagick or other command line program.
How bad is it when you call info ImageMagick's library via FFI?
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