image-png VS crates.io

Encoding images to PNG with the "fast" compression mode is now an order of magnitude faster. This is achieved using a custom Zlib compression implementation that leverages assumptions about the patterns in PNG data to get reasonable compression ratios at phenomenal speeds.

However, the latest release of the png crate - published less than a day ago - has an ultrafast compression mode that's slightly faster than the QOI reference implementation at a comparable compression ratio. So basically you get the properties of QOI in a much more widely used image format.

In other areas, miniz_oxide is faster than miniz, Symphonia is faster than ffmpeg on most codecs, the not-yet-announced zune-png beats both libpng and the more heavily optimized libspng, and the png crate is getting considerable improvements too and also beats libpng.

gif, png, zune-jpeg are on par with their C counterparts in terms of performance

Fun fact: libpng-sys was so difficult to create safe Rust wrapper for that people just wrote their own, 100% safe Rust PNG decoder: https://github.com/image-rs/image-png

I didn't get time to finish the full spec for my attempt at a PNG decoder but it was working on common cases and was faster than image-png at the time https://users.rust-lang.org/t/new-rust-png-decoding-library/30952. I suspect it's not the case anymore since it changes it's deflate crate usage. Here is the perf issue on the image crate https://github.com/image-rs/image-png/issues/114. My code was way simpler than the one in the image crate so that might still be worth a read if you are interested.

The crate actually forbids unsafe. There's nothing necessarily wrong with unsafe code, but not having it provides a nice assurance. Plus if you are willing to tolerate (well audited) unsafe code then you may well be better off just using libpng.

All the code discussed in this article can be accessed through this repository. For integration with existing projects consider using keyword_extraction crate available on crates.io.

So, be sure to double-check your critical libraries and be sure their alternatives exist in the Rust ecosystem. There’s a good chance the crates you need are available in Rust's crates.io repository.

The previous section was very simple, this section is also very simple but introduces us to cargo which is Rust's package manager, as a JS dev my mind goes straight to NPM.

Now, there has to be a place where all these packages come from. Similar to npmjs registry, where all node packages are registered, stored and retrieved, Rust also has something called crates.io where many helpful packages and dependencies are registered.

Before proceeding, let's check https://crates.io/, the official Rust package registry.

The most thrilling aspect has been the joy of writing the backend. It's like every struct, enum, and method in Rust forms this interconnected Multiverse of code , which you can see in crates.io which is best Documentation experience I Ever Had.

5. Crates.io

When using crates from eg. crates.io, and also things like std and core

Vendoring your packages was very tedious to even remotely get to work with Cargo. I spent a very long time getting Cargo to work together with cargo-local-registry. We vendor crates from crates.io and a custom internal registry.

So this is my question: Which way was the right to find it out? There is no info about this feature on crates.io. I also have no clue what exactly it does and why it is named rwh_05.