The last year was mainly one of stability. Working up to 0.23 we had fixed many outstanding stability risks and it continues to be one of the most long-serving major versions in a while. In this post you find an overview on the massive progress made with it, and outstanding issues that you could contribute towards in 2021.

Emulsion is a fast and minimalistic image viewer that runs on modern graphic interfaces and uses image for file loading. Since the release of 4.0 it also supports viewing animated PNGs (APNG). This is enabled by the new Apng interface added in release 0.23.6 of image. You can find more information and the newest releases here:

The release of png version 0.16.5 was one of the most personally exciting ones recently. It contains APNG support and large decoding improvements that will benefit everyone, both of which have been anticipated and planned for quite a while.

While the 0.22 release series received a few bug fixes and feature releases, the next major version was being worked on in the background, and comes with improvements to error handling, and the buffer and loading interfaces. A more detailed view on the changes is in the following paragraphs.

The image crate offers a powerful and versatile core of operations for encoding, decoding and manipulating images. It is used in game libraries, graphics API bindings and, as the pool of Rust programs expands, even in editors. It very recently reached 1.000.000 total downloads 🎉. Given the scope of the project, it isn’t perfect and may never be, but it works for many real world use cases and we are grateful for all the positive feedback we get.

We, the image-rs group, are glad to announce the release of a new version of the central image library. This is especially noteworthy since it resolves some long standing interface issues, removes some old deprecated items and marks some new ones, and finally contains a plethora of improvement to the set of image decoders and encoders.

While reviewing some unsafe Vec::from_raw_parts operations within the library, trying to justify their existence with stronger reasoning, we noticed that they instead did not meet the required conditions set by the standard library. This unsoundness was quickly removed, but we noted that the same unjustified reasoning had been applied by a dependency introduced in 0.21.

The image related projects have been moved out of the Piston organization. We are excited to continue the work on image processing under the new group, image-rs. The project remains as much in the hands of the community as before but freed from the strong ties to the game engine. We’ll have two groups of contributors: