// the find
leerob/pixo
High-performance image compression library written in Rust.
pixo is a from-scratch image compression library in Rust — no libpng, no libjpeg, no C bindings. It targets PNG and JPEG, ships a 159 KB WASM build, and comes with unusually thorough documentation explaining the algorithms it implements. The primary audience is developers who want a pure-Rust or WASM-native image pipeline without pulling in native codec dependencies.
Zero native dependencies is real and meaningful here — the WASM binary stays tiny because there's no C codec being compiled in. The documentation is genuinely good: full algorithm walkthroughs for Huffman, LZ77, DEFLATE, DCT, and quantization, written as learning material, not just API reference. Test coverage is high (86%, 965 tests) and includes fuzz targets for the four main encode/decode paths, which matters for a codec where malformed input is a real attack surface. SIMD is handled via platform-specific modules for x86_64 and aarch64 with a fallback path, so performance doesn't silently degrade on non-x86.
Compression quality and speed will lag behind battle-hardened encoders like mozjpeg or libpng — reimplementing these from scratch means years of tuning work is missing. The benchmark doc compares against Squoosh but the methodology and hardware details are sparse, making it hard to know how much quality/size you're trading away. Format support stops at PNG and JPEG — no WebP, AVIF, or GIF, which limits usefulness in any modern image pipeline where WebP is table stakes. The `.cursor/plans/` directory committed to the repo is noise that signals this was heavily AI-assisted, which is fine but worth knowing when you're betting on long-term maintenance.