No progress bar shown when parsing BinaryView headers

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
38/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
cpp
Domain
performance, reverse-engineering

Research direction

Start at BinaryView::Init and trace the binary-opening flow to find where header parsing occurs relative to progress-bar creation and percentage updates. Reproduce with a large binary, then verify that the progress bar appears before header parsing and includes that work in its percentage; assess separately whether background-thread parsing is feasible.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Component: UI Effort: Low Impact: Medium

When opening a binary, the header is parsed (BinaryView::Init) on the UI thread before a progress bar appears. In cases of large binaries, this can take tens of seconds during which the UI is unresponsive and no indication of progress is shown.

We should show the progress bar before parsing the headers, and include it in the progress percentage. Optionally, we should parse it on a background thread so the UI thread does not hang.

Dominant language
C++
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
5d 5h
Merged PRs (30d)
19

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