libdeflate VS chess

zune-inflate is a port of libdeflate to safe Rust.

> The QOI benchmarks shows it only lagging a small bit behind PNG in compression ratio, while performing much faster (multiples) in both encoding and decoding.

Presumably that’s with stock libpng, which uses zlib. I wonder if anyone tried patching it to use the substantially faster (on x86) libdeflate[1] instead? It doesn’t do streaming, but you shouldn’t really need it for PNG textures.

[1] https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate

Eric biggers libdeflate https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate/blob/master/lib/deflate_decompress.c

Note that libdeflate has used essentially the same method since 2016 (https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate/blob/v0.4/lib/adler32...), though I recently switched it to use a slightly different method (https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate/blob/v1.12/lib/x86/ad...) that performs more consistently across different families of x86 CPUs.

Going away from Zlib proper but staying with its format, there’s libdeflate[1], an implementation that’s substantially faster on modern machines but can’t stream, and of course Zopfli[2], a glacially slow compressor that’s somewhat better (and occasionally much more so).

[1] https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate

[2] https://github.com/google/zopfli

I think it's in the title: assets. The example case is replacing the BMP assets used by a game with QOI with a resulting 10x size reduction: https://github.com/skeeto/chess/commit/5c123b3

I think this functions as a test case. For a game as simple as a chess UI, PNG would probably be fine unless you're code-golfing on the final output binary or refusing to use common dependencies. But for some programs (e.g. large video games), preloading all your assets is very common and decoding speed can be crucial. Maybe the assets could even be left in compressed form in memory in order to reduce the system requirements? I'm not sure if this is common or not.

However, I don't really like the constraints this imposes, so I prefer my #include trick. In real programs I don't actually rely on xxd (part of Vim), and instead write a custom embed tool as part of the build. It's only a few lines of code to match the standard input behavior of xxd.

https://github.com/skeeto/chess/commit/9cc8c60 (depends on Vim xxd)