core-js VS libjpeg-turbo

This is surprisingly common. The other example off the top of my head, a single maintainer of a very popular project who had to temporarily abandon it due to lack of funds, is Denis Pushkarev (zloirock) and core.js (https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02...).

The majority of OSS projects have most of their contributions by one person (the project leader), and the vast majority of OSS contributors don't do it for their job. It seems nearly every single popular OSS project is like this (one unpaid, maybe sponsored, volunteer doing most of the work); it's not even worth listing projects and names, because you can just pick a couple projects you know and I bet at least one will be an example. Fortunately, most of these people seem to be well-off (probably in part due to the quality of programming jobs), but every once in a while there's someone who's not so fortunate. It should be more common to sponsor maintainers, especially if they are asking for donations provided they can prove that they really need the money (the world we live in, some people who have plenty fake issues to solicit donations, then others who genuinely need and deserve the money are scolded and left unfunded because of them).

Funny you say that, I was just thinking earlier today back to the core-js drama.

In short: the creator of a NPM package that is used by approximately everyone, everywhere, was facing a legal battle. He had been developing this package full time for years and did not have the cash on hand to hire a lawyer. He added a console log that ran on installing his package that said something like "If you're using core-js please consider donating". Queue an absolute shitstorm of people screaming at him in the github issues and him going to prison for around 10 months. Luckily he seems to be back on the grind nowadays, with a decently robust cross-platform slush fund to boot (~200k USD across Pateron, Open Collective, Bitcoin).

It can be a rough world out there for the folks building for the "focus, productivity and anti-distraction" platform.

https://github.com/zloirock/core-js

I think everyone here knows that, at some point, the site would start costing a lot of money and would need to be funded in some way. I would love for the Wikipedia donation model to work for a site like this but everything I find points to that not being the case. Reddit gold not covering server costs and open source devs not tied to a corporation struggling to continue working on their projects being two prime examples. If anyone has anything that can convince me to give it a try, please let me know and I will switch this to a non-profit.

Open source developers are not being paid. They published under licenses that allow zero cost and businesses won't pay.

If you want to write open source code for living, you have to find a business model that works. In this case, it is even under permissive license.

* code freeze - code is under open source license only a certain time after commit/release. Maybe add "support", aka you get security fixes in timely manner.

* open core - put some features behind commericial door.

* go ImageSharp way of split license. That one is fun, because MS deprecated/killed (throws exceptions on attempt to use) official image/font library and that was was intended replacement. Rather blatant offloading of costs.

This has been rehashed several time (core-js recently https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02...).

The gist of it is: Companies are not going to pay if they don't have to. That is the reality and it's not going to change.

This is one of the few examples. https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md

Open source: It sounds pretty nice. Open to everyone... But it sucks in general. People really don't care to contribute to open-source. (e.g. here). It is a really good resource for development but for people who don't know anything about development, it is not important. There needs to be some financial income / support for good open-source.

there is https://github.com/zloirock/core-js but is more or less a 1 guy team and he is grossly under paid and well just read this https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md im shocked he still works on it

Choice is good to a point but at some point it becomes crippling. It still haunts me on Rails. Is it yarn, is it brunch, is it npm, is it webpacker, is it esbuild, is it import maps... plus personally the pad-left debacle left a bad taste in my mouth and this little nugget about core-js was heartbreaking. For me it's hard to pick JS for anything other than what I absolutely must.

There's a real story behind that (but the software is core-js, not nginx)

npm WARN deprecated [email protected]: core-js@<3 is no longer maintained and not recommended for usage due to the number of issues. Please, upgrade your dependencies to the actual version of core-js@3. \> [email protected] postinstall /home/daniel/src/test/node_modules/core-js > node -e "try{require('./postinstall')}catch(e){}" Thank you for using core-js ( https://github.com/zloirock/core-js ) for polyfilling JavaScript standard library! The project needs your help! Please consider supporting of core-js on Open Collective or Patreon: > https://opencollective.com/core-js > https://www.patreon.com/zloirock Also, the author of core-js ( https://github.com/zloirock ) is looking for a good job -)

> all decoders will render the same pixels

Not true. Even just within libjpeg, there are three different IDCT implementations (jidctflt.c, jidctfst.c, jidctint.c) and they produce different pixels (it's a classic speed vs quality trade-off). It's spec-compliant to choose any of those.

A few years ago, in libjpeg-turbo, they changed the smoothing kernel used for decoding (incomplete) progressive JPEGs, from a 3x3 window to 5x5. This meant the decoder produced different pixels, but again, that's still valid:

https://github.com/libjpeg-turbo/libjpeg-turbo/commit/6d91e9...

Last vestiges of this fact AFAIK were libjpeg, which had a macro NEED_SHORT_EXTERNAL_NAMES that shortens all public identifiers to have unique 6-letter-long prefixes. Libjpeg-turbo nowadays has removed them though [1].

[1] https://github.com/libjpeg-turbo/libjpeg-turbo/commit/52ded8...

While I think the move to safer code through Rust and other alternatives is a nice breath of fresh air, I doubt you can get these kinds of optimization without using unsafe code in Rust. These optimized implementations often require some kind of safety-bypassing memory modifications to work as efficiently ad they do.

There's a reason https://github.com/libjpeg-turbo/libjpeg-turbo/tree/main/sim... is filled with assembly files with conditional loading.

Sure. You'll see it very often in codec implementations. From rav1e, a fast AV1 encoder mostly written in Rust: https://github.com/xiph/rav1e/tree/master/src/x86

Large portions of the algorithm have been translated into assembly for ARM and x86. Shaving even a couple percent off something like motion compensation search will add up to meaningful gains.

Or the current reference implementation of JPEG: https://github.com/libjpeg-turbo/libjpeg-turbo/tree/main/sim...

zune-jpeg is 1.5x to 2x faster than jpeg-decoder and is on par with libjpeg-turbo.

This is interesting from the standpoint of how new JVM features can be used to improve performance (what I presume the article's main purpose to have been), but the image processing improvement itself isn't head-turning. Also, we've found that libjpeg-turbo (https://libjpeg-turbo.org/) is ~5x (IIRC, can re-run my JMH benchmark if anyone wants me to) as fast for decoding JPEGs as ImageIO, so we wouldn't even benefit from this change in 21 much.

libjpeg-turbo: https://github.com/libjpeg-turbo/libjpeg-turbo/blob/main/simd/x86_64/jsimdcpu.asm

libjpeg-turbo

For all but the simplest formats (basically BMP), the difficulty of implementing encoding/decoding from scratch is significant - well beyond a beginner's ability, and challenging/time-consuming even for senior developers. So, libraries are used in practice - e.g. libpng and libjpeg-turbo.