The Bat! v8 takes a new dimension in speed and stability
Ritlabs has released The Bat! v8.0 with significant improvements in program’s operation speed and overall stability.
"The Bat! works much better and faster on multi-core processors and multi-processor systems thanks to the improved way of handling how multiple threads simultaneously access the same data in memory. Besides that, while idling, The Bat! uses the CPU less frequently and employs a lower number of threads to finish the same task. As a result, The Bat! works faster and generates lower number of the Page Faults (a Task Manager metric of program efficiency). The 64-bit version of The Bat! has much smaller memory footprint than previous versions of the program" – told Masiutin Maxim, the CEO of Ritlabs.
The 64-bit version of The Bat! now extensively uses the AVX-512 instruction set, currently supported in Intel's Xeon Phi x200 (Knights Landing) released in 2016 and the following processors released in 2017: Skylake-X Core i7 (7800X, 7820X) and i9 models, Skylake-SP (Xeon Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum).
The new version also supports for CPUs that are equipped with the Enhanced REP MOVSB/STOSB (ERMS) feature. On such CPUs, The Bat! uses this feature to copy or fill large memory blocks. Besides that, The Bat! has improvements in the speed of the CRC-32 calculation when the processor does not support the CRC32 instruction (hardware implementation of the CRC-32 algorithm), but if it does, the calculation speed increases even more. The Bat! uses CRC-32 algorithm internally in many cases, so the overall program speed has increased as a result.
There have been improvements in accessibility. The new version offers better support for 4K Ultra High Definition monitors, screen reader applications and refreshable braille displays/terminals. The Bat! v8.0 comes up with a smarter way of dealing with the images. And so, when The Bat! saves images, for example when you edit an HTML message where you inserted inline images from the clipboard, or you have added a photo to an address book entry – the program chooses between the two file formats - PNG and JPG, compressing to both formats and seeing which of the files is smaller.
In the new version there is a number of updates in the HTML editor: the text formatting has been improved so that the bi-directional text and "exotic" scripts are rendered reliably. The "justify" alignment and custom character spacing can now be applied to bi-directional text. There is also a new paragraph alignment type: "distribute". The distributed paragraphs are similar to justified paragraphs, but space is added between all characters, not between words. This type of alignment is common to Far East languages. The customized alignment is available for the last line of justified and distributed paragraphs. New special options for vertical text in table cells have been introduced, this allows for automatic application of vertical fonts and switching the column order from right-to-left to left-to-right. There are also visual improvements which allow users to define a customized degree of transparency for backgrounds of paragraphs, tables, table cells and text boxes.
There are numerous improvements in storing, loading and processing the of configuration data, so that now The Bat! is more robust and avoids any data loss or damage. The new version is also more efficient in handling temporary files and this makes The Bat! send and receive large number of messages very fast. In addition to the improvements mentioned above, the new version works better with QR codes. Also, the IMAP4 protocol handling in The Bat! v8.0 is faster and smoother.
