Building Image Compression in Rust with libvips Real Benchmarks, Real Tradeoffs
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community 5
strategic 3
personal 6
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Rust image compression with real benchmarks, relevant for performance engineering.
Summary
Building image compression in Rust with libvips 8.15.1 and Axum, the author found WebP at Q=80 saves only 42.5% vs JPEG's 41.3% on complex photographic content, contradicting marketing claims. mozjpeg offers 10-15% better compression but requires compiling libvips from source, adding operational complexity not justified when libjpeg at Q=80 already covers 90% of use cases. PNG quantization via imagequant (same engine as TinyPNG) achieves up to 36% savings with minimal perceptual loss.