cf-wasm VS narcissus

Image processing/transformations with built-in CDNs is one of the more common solutions you would find out there but can get pretty expensive and locked in over time.

Vercel is a good example that provides a built-in “next/image” solution for the NextJS framework that optimises images for better performance, however, it gets very expensive as you scale.

Alternatively, running your own service with one of the most common image processing libraries like SharpJS is great but can get pretty difficult to run in a serverless environment with CDNs and all the other bells and whistles alongside all your other code while the cold startup time of Sharp in a serverless environment can be pretty brutal.

With all the growth around rebuilding engines in Rust for performance gains, I thought there must be an image processing library written in Rust which could be compiled to WebAssembly (WASM) and run way faster. That’s when I discovered Photon https://github.com/silvia-odwyer/photon by Silvia, who has done amazing work with the library.

This eventually led me to discover https://github.com/fineshopdesign/cf-wasm/tree/main/packages... that has already transcribed the Photon package into a WASM binary for easy use in edge v8 environments like Cloudflare workers or NextJS Edge functions.

Using these packages I built an API layer on the NextJS framework allowing you to easily process local and remote images at blazing fast speeds with a bunch of helper functions making it similar to use as most paid Image processing APIs. If hosted on Vercel, you can make use of the built-in CDN cache for files less than 10 MB at no extra charge with Edge caching.

Some of the features:

- Blazing fast image processing

- Fully serverless, runs on Vercel Edge functions

- Resize, crop, compress, tint, rotate, format and more

- Global distribution with Edge functions

- Automated CDN cache with Edge functions

- Replacement for `next/image` processing on Vercel

- Local and remote image processing

Some problems:

- The Photon lib has last been updated in 2020

- There are still a few obvious bugs when using it for more advanced requirements like 8k image processing on edge function due to poor memory management in Rust

- No sexy features right now like AI image optimisation and selective background blurring

- If you are looking for an all-in-one solution with Image Storage + image processing/CDN, this is not it (something we will be releasing soon on JigsawStack.com)

I think the Photon library and the API have a lot more potential for growth and will be hoping for more contributions from the community as Rust gets more popular!

Take a look at the current live demo site running on Cloudflare Pages. Also see the monorepo which is home to both the Cloudflare Worker code and the demo client sites.