[go-nuts] ANN: ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick bindings

Thanks! I wasn't aware of any other bindings for IM nor GM. We've been
using this internally since August 2012 and there were no public bindings
at that time, so we wrote our own. From a quick look at go graphics, it
seems they're wrapping the MagickWand library, while we're wrapping
MagickCore, so it seems both packages are intended for different use cases.

I think that would be a terrible waste of time and the developer is
severely underestimating the effort required. IM or GM are big projects,
around 500K lines for IM and I guess GM is in the same ballpark.
Furthermore, they rely on other C libraries for some other tasks, like
decoding some formats. Porting everything from C to Go would require many
many hours and, probably, you'll end up with a slower implementation than
using cgo to call to the C libraries. The only benefit would be able to run
on environments when using cgo/unsafe is not allowed (like GAE), but I
personally have zero interest in those.

We already have written (and thrown away) decoders for png, jpeg and gif,
with both encoding and decoding support. We initially wrote them to get
better decoding/encoding support (image/gif didn't support encoding at the
time, and all image/* packages failed to decode 20-30% of our sample set),
but we found that even with libpng/libjpeg/libgif based decoders, Go's
image package still sucked. Want to resize an image? Write your own
algorithm! Need to work with animated GIFs? Not supported! If you need to
do anything barely advanced with images, just forget about the packages in
the standard library. You'll eventually hit a wall and will have to rewrite
all your image handling code using a real image library.