Wuffs’ PNG image decoder is memory-safe but can also clock between 1.22x and 2.75x faster than libpng, the widely used open source C implementation. It’s also faster than the libspng, lodepng and stb_image C libraries as well as the most popular Go and Rust PNG libraries. High performance is achieved by SIMD-acceleration, 8-byte wide input and copies when bit-twiddling and zlib-decompressing the entire image all-at-once (into 1 large intermediate buffer) instead of 1 row at a time (into smaller, reusable buffers). All-at-once requires more intermediate memory but allows substantially more of the image to be decoded in the zlib-decompressor’s fastest code paths.

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