[squeak-dev] Re: JPEG plugin.

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Tue Nov 3 21:01:42 UTC 2009


John M McIntosh wrote:
> I'm looking at the JPEG plugin and wondering?
> 
> (a) Should I convert that to using the os-x platforms JPEG 
> implementation, versus our usage of the source from the "Independent 
> JPEG Group's software"?

Seems like a bad trade unless you want to severely rewrite the plugin 
interface (making it effectively a new plugin). The current interface is 
tied specifically to the IJGs implementation with internal structures 
and functions being exposed fairly directly.

> (b) Should we consider upgrading the VMs from version "6b  27-Mar-1998"  
> to the more current "release 7 of 27-Jun-2009" since we store the source 
> in the VM SVN tree at the moment.

That sounds like a good idea.

> I've not looked but
> 
> (a) Apple might have a private implementation that could be faster since 
> it would likely use hardware vector services.

Almost certainly. Intel's performance prims can make JPEG stuff quite a 
bit faster already.

> (b) Relying on the system libraries for conversion means fixes for 
> security issues get prompt attention, versus our non-attention now.

I'm not sure about this. The IJGs code has been quite robust and to my 
knowledge no exploits have ever been published. OTOH, Microsofts 
implementation seems to have been sucessfully attacked in the past, so 
it's a bit questionable whether using the OS vendors implementation 
would necessarily be more secure than the IJGs version.

Cheers,
   - Andreas



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