Rust-Based, Memory-Safe PNG Decoders "Vastly Outperform" C-Based PNG Libraries

Video and image encoders/decoders written in the Rust programming language for its memory safety guarantees is often viewed as one of the compelling areas for the programming language to better protect against malformed/malicious content especially within web browsers. Not only are Rust-based PNG image decoders proving to be more secure than C-based decoders, but the performance of the Rust solutions can be even faster.

Sergey Davidoff with the image-png and zune-png Rust projects shared that the team posted to Reddit some promising details around their own findings for memory-safe Rust PNG decoders being able to outperform common C PNG libraries by a significant margin.

The developers posted their findings in a Reddit post and commented:

"Memory-safe implementations of PNG (png, zune-png, wuffs) now dramatically outperform memory-unsafe ones (libpng, spng, stb_image) when decoding images.

Rust png crate that tops our benchmark shows 1.8x improvement over libpng on x86 and 1.5x improvement on ARM."

The speedy performance does still depend upon architecture-specific SIMD optimizations so your mileage may vary. For the benchmarks posted on Reddit, they were using an AMD Zen 4 system.

In addition to being faster and more secure than the C-based PNG libraries, they also argue that these Rust-based solutions are production ready:

"Is this production-ready?

Yes!

All three memory-safe implementations support APNG, reading/writing auxiliary chunks, and other features expected of a modern PNG library.

png and zune-png have been tested on a wide range of real-world images, with over 100,000 of them in the test corpus alone. And png is used by every user of the image crate, so it has been thoroughly battle-tested.

WUFFS PNG v0.4 seems to fail on grayscale images with alpha in our tests. We haven't investigated this in depth, it might be a configuration issue on our part rather than a bug. Still, we cannot vouch for WUFFS like we can for Rust libraries."

It will be interesting to see how the adoption of Rust-based PNG implementation goes over the coming years along with other Rust-based image/video encoders and decoders.