<story><title>Libspng – C library for reading and writing PNG files</title><url>https://libspng.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>derefr</author><text>I gotta say, it’s great that someone is making this attempt, however it turns out. PNG has been in a uniquely bad position re: “monoculture”, with libpng being not just the “reference implementation”, but the &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; implementation anyone bothers to use.&lt;p&gt;But libpng was intended as &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; a reference implementation—a rigid adherent to the PNG standard, for the sake of having a “runnable version” of the PNG standard—and was never particularly optimized for production use-cases, or code readability&amp;#x2F;maintainability&amp;#x2F;low attack surface, or any other criteria you might like to have. Libpng is optimized for one thing only: allowing other PNG implementations to build spec-compatibility test suites by testing against libpng behaviour.&lt;p&gt;Because of this rigid adherence, libpng doesn’t implement—and will never implement—any features that &lt;i&gt;aren’t&lt;/i&gt; in the base PNG spec, like APNG.&lt;p&gt;And since everyone &lt;i&gt;uses&lt;/i&gt; libpng as their PNG implementation (for &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; reason), nobody ends up adopting these extra features. (Sure, all the major browsers except Edge support APNG, but does your image editor? Does your IoT thermostat whose OS uses PNG image assets? Does your game console? Nah. Because these all just compile in libpng. And &lt;i&gt;this&lt;/i&gt; is what kills support for features like APNG in the crib.)&lt;p&gt;That was never the PNG Working Group’s intent, of course. They don’t want to restrict the development of extra PNG features (yes, even though they developed MNG and might see features like APNG as “competing” with MNG, they don’t really care.) They keep libpng the way it is, not for ideological reasons, but simply because they don’t care about doing anything with libpng that moves it away from “reference implementation of the base PNG spec” territory. (And why would they? Their job as the PNG Working Group is to produce the PNG base spec. It’s supposed to be everyone &lt;i&gt;else’s&lt;/i&gt; job, in the ecosystem, to produce conformant implementations. They even gave you libpng to make that easier!)&lt;p&gt;So, like I said, I’m glad someone is finally writing an alternative implementation (in C), such that the projects that currently use libpng could reasonably choose to switch to libspng. It’s the same feeling I get from seeing LibreSSL and BoringSSL: that an ecosystem that was essentially “dead” and stuck in a set of bad choices due to everyone sticking with one unchanging reference impl, is now coming alive again.</text></comment>
<story><title>Libspng – C library for reading and writing PNG files</title><url>https://libspng.org/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>floor_</author><text>I find stb_image single file format and lack of dependencies to be extremely convenient.</text></comment>