Wuffs is a memory-safe programming language (and a standard library written in that language) for wrangling untrusted file formats safely. Wrangling includes parsing, decoding and encoding. Example file formats include images, audio, video, fonts and compressed archives.
It is also fast. On many of its GIF decoding benchmarks, Wuffs measures 2x faster than “giflib” (C), 3x faster than “image/gif” (Go) and 7x faster than “gif” (Rust).
Version 0.2.0
The headline feature is that the GIF decoder is now of production quality. There is now API for overall metadata (e.g. ICCP color profiles) and to recreate each frame (width, height, BGRA pixels, timing, etc.) of a GIF animation, instead of version 0.1’s proof-of-concept GIF decoder API, which just gave you a one-dimensional stream of palette indexes. It also now accepts a variety of GIF images that are invalid, when strictly following the GIF specifiction, but are nonetheless accepted by other real world GIF implementations. The Wuffs GIF decoder has also been optimized to be about 1.5x faster than Wuffs version 0.1 and about 2x faster than giflib (the C library).
The Wuffs GIF decoder is being trialled by Skia, the 2-D graphics library used by both the Android operating system and the Chromium web browser.
Work also proceeds on the NIE and RAC file formats, but both are still experimental and may change later in backwards incompatible ways.
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Published: 2019-12-20