webp_server_go VS govips

WebP Cloud is SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) version of our open-source component called WebP Server Go. With WebP Cloud, users can simply log in using their GitHub account and provide the URL of the original image. In return, they receive a new URL that serves the image in WebP format, with built-in WebP conversion, CDN (Content Delivery Network), and caching capabilities. For example, an image with a size of 100KB at https://blog.webp.se/hetzner-arm64/c1-board.png can be transformed into a WebP version with only 60KB in size, available at https://p2k7zwb.webp.ee/hetzner-arm64/c1-board.png while preserving the image quality with minimal degradation.

I'm currently using a tiny proxy server which does all that on the fly and caches it. Works brilliantly. Allows me to use lossless PNGs instead of JPGs without any drawbacks except a slight increase in response time the very first time a file is requested.

We chose to use govips which is a cgo wrapper around the libvips image manipulation library. The majority of new development for services in our backend is written using baseplate.go. But Go is not an ideal choice for media processing as it cannot keep up with the performance of native code. The most widely used image-processing libraries like libmagick are primarily written in C or C++. Speed was a major factor in selecting libvips in order to keep latency low on CDN cache misses for images. In our tests, libvips was 3–4 times faster than libmagick on basic image processing operations. Content-aware smart cropping was implemented by porting smartcrop.js to Go. This is the only operation implemented in pure Go.

Hi! You are willing to dive into some cgo we have a couple of feature requests :) https://github.com/davidbyttow/govips