msgpack-rust VS rawloader

This is similar in practice to using abi_stable, and end-users will still receive compiled files, but your plugins will be sandboxed and a single build will work on all platforms. The downside is that it's a bit more work because WebAssembly's support for passing complex data types between the host and the WebAssembly code is in the preliminary stages, so you need to do something like using Serde to encode your data into something like Bincode or MessagePack (or JSON and friends) to hand it off between the host and the plugin.

I absolutely loved all the crates available that made my life very simple in many cases. I used (among others) the slint ui framework, kamadak-exif, img_hash, fast_image_resize and rawloader.

The simplest form is just to pack 10 or 12 bit values. There's all kinds of variations of that:

https://github.com/pedrocr/rawloader/blob/a59bb78d156277781a...

There are a few formats that use a curve and less bits. They do become lossy and doing dithering on decompress is useful to avoid banding.

The Nikon one you mention was only used very early and is decoded by decode_8bit_wtable() in that file. It's just looking up the 8 bit value in the table and then adding some randomness to prevent the banding.