What if pngquant was written in Rust?

[kornelski]

I'm seeking feedback on moving parts of pngquant from C99 to Rust. At first I'd only move pngquant CLI executable to Rust, but leave libimagequant as a pure C library.

It would build as a statically linked binary on OS X, Linux and Windows, x86 and x86_64. Rust's support for other architectures exists, but AFAIK is still immature.

How does this impact you?

[quiret]

I do not know. Just recently learned about Rust. I like the good performance of the libimagequant library, and as long as that stays, I guess it will be okay?

Make sure you do not change the API. Btw, still waiting on that custom palette setting function. :-)

[sergiomb2]

Hi, is Rust OS independent ?
Rust does not exist in the Linux Fedora yet , still in review [1]

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=915043

[kornelski]

Rust certainly supports Linux, although it may take some time before distros create packages for it:
http://www.rust-lang.org/install.html

It also getting musl support, which as far as I understand, allows it to create static binaries that work without glibc, so are compatible with any Linux distro (on x86/x64)

[rcanavan]

While support for Linux may just be a question of time, older and/or more exotic platforms such as IRIX will probably never get a functioning rust compiler. Currently, pngquant can be compiled basically everywhere even with ancient C compilers. I'd prefer if you'd stick with C and not use features from standards newer than C99.

[kornelski]

Rust is on its way to Fedora and Debian. For platforms without packages it's easy to install and keep up to update via rustup. It can target iOS, Android, *BSD, PPC and MIPS Linux. Not IRIX though.

Currently pngquant is annoying on Windows due to poor C support in Visual Studio, POSIX-isms in the code, and need for bash-based configure script. OTOH Rust has very good support for Windows, and Cargo build scripts can be used to hide the pains of C integration.

For a while now I've stopped using C for and have been using Rust instead for all new projects, and I'm quite happy with it.

For now pngquant works well enough, so I don't feel pressure rewriting it immediately. But if I decide to add any major functionality, I'll probably split libimagequant and pngquant, and rewrite pngquant.c in Rust.

[sergiomb2]

Found this today: https://fedoramagazine.org/rust-meets-fedora/

[pickhardt]

I'd also recommend considering Go. It could be great for what you're trying to accomplish.

[kornelski]

I'm already having great results in Rust. Since pngquant and libimagequant are C projects, I think Rust, which does not have GC runtime and can produce pure "C" libraries, is a much better fit for this project.

[ex]

Rust is fine, please not Go.

[kornelski]

Now cargo run runs pngquant :)

It's still all 100% C, but everything is in Cargo packages. Almost builds on Windows, too.

https://crates.io/crates/imagequant-sys
https://github.com/pornel/pngquant/blob/master/Cargo.toml

[kornelski]

First Rust code has landed!

The good news is the whole program builds on Windows out of the box!

[kornelski]

See #252