cc @nigeltao

A WebP encoder would be a lot of work. If someone wants to write one, that would be great. But as far as I know nobody is working on that.

That's a shame, whilst I understand that it may be a bit of work, it feels like it should be out of the box considering webp and go are both made by you guys!

Adding C bindings when converting to webp using third party packages can be messy, as well as using the executables.

I would love to offer a hand to contribute to the /x/image library but wouldn't know where to start.

I understand that it may be a bit of work

It's not a bit of work. As Ian said, it's a lot of work. :-)

That's a shame, whilst I understand that it may be a bit of work, it feels like it should be out of the box considering webp and go are both made by you guys!

Adding C bindings when converting to webp using third party packages can be messy, as well as using the executables.

The good news is that image encoding is much less of a security minefield than image decoding is, simply because the input format (a bitmap) is far, far simpler.

That said, have you considered ImageFlow? It’s free software (AGPL) available as both a daemon and a library. Commercial licenses are also available.

Starting a new website project with a Go backend and was planning on using WebP for image thumbnails and it's really sad to see that there's no native encoder.. :(

I would really like to avoid using C bindings (due to performance and memory safety concerns), but it seems that's the only option at the moment, except for executing the official webp binary, which is also not the best idea, since you'd have to either write the file to disk or come up with a complicated virtual FS just for it.

I also considered using Rust, but that's way too advanced for me.

Edit: I found https://github.com/nickalie/go-webpbin which seems quite decent. haven't tested it yet though.

Could go-libwebp by Jack Mordaunt offer a potential solution? I'm aware that rewriting libwebp in Go would be quite time-consuming, but Jack Mordaunt utilized ccgo and was able to port the libwebp C code to native Go code, making it functional, if I understand correctly. I'm not an expert, and I'm unsure of any potential risks this approach may present, but I wanted to share the idea. @JackMordaunt

I think there is a better solution. Example may use c-bindings from library on C language.

Could go-libwebp by Jack Mordaunt offer a potential solution? I'm aware that rewriting libwebp in Go would be quite time-consuming, but Jack Mordaunt utilized ccgo and was able to port the libwebp C code to native Go code, making it functional, if I understand correctly. I'm not an expert, and I'm unsure of any potential risks this approach may present, but I wanted to share the idea. @JackMordaunt

Thanks for the reference!

Yes, it's functional. However there's a lot of downside to the transpilation approach which bars it from being anything official.

• it relies on ccgo for transpilation, an experimental tool under active development
• it generates Go code semantically identical to the C source, everything is a uintptr and thus totally unsafe
• no support for vectorized instructions, or any inline assembly. This makes it a decent amount slower (without benchmarks its hard to say how much slower, but it definitely is)

For anyone interested, go-libwebp also allows calling into dynamic libraries if available. However this uses purego to make those calls without requiring cgo. purego is also an experimental tool.