miniz_oxide VS libdeflate

There's quite a bit of unsafe (ick) and there's even an unsafe API that allow one to shoot themselves in the foot (more ick). I'm cautiously optimistic that the performance demonstrated by miniz_oxide (a project with lots of bit reading and zero unsafe) could mean a reduction of unsafe in bitter without sacrificing performance.

miniz_oxide is slightly faster than zlib

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