High-Performance PNG Decoding

High-Performance PNG Codec It's been some time I have written about a High-Performance QOI Codec, which joined other codecs offered by Blend2D library in 2024. The development of image codecs continued and now I would like to announce a new high-performance PNG codec, which is much faster than other available codecs written in C, C++, and other programming languages. Introduction PNG is not new; it's been with us for decades and it's most likely one of the most deployed image formats ever, which also means that many others focused on improving the quality of PNG codecs. And indeed, there are many libraries that provide speedy PNG decoding, encoding, or both: We can even find pretty interesting statements such as Memory-safe PNG decoders now vastly outperform C PNG libraries, etc... However, PNG decoding is fortunately not about a programming language! DEFLATE - The Challenger The biggest challenge of decoding PNG images is DEFLATE compression algorithm, which is used to compress ... Read full article.