Web image stacks still carry accidental complexity: defaults that are “fine until they aren’t”, vendor sprawl, and latency cliffs when ingestion, transform, and delivery are welded into one hot path.
The thread that started lazy-image
My entry point was compression science, not hero demos. Formats already diverge; encoders diverge further. If we squeeze better bytes-per-quality inside a predictable core, storage and bandwidth fall without asking every user to become an imaging expert. From there the ambition widened: an image engine that can live near edge compute, not only deep inside a monolithic app server.
lazy-image is not trying to be the universal Swiss Army knife. It is a Pure Rust bet on modern encoders and compression with a path towards WebAssembly on V8, because that is where I want throughput without always paying the classic Node native-addon tax.
Separation still matters
Keep ingestion, transform, and delivery decoupled. When they collapse into a single request, you inherit latency spikes and hard-to-debug contention—whether or not the transform layer is Rust or WASM.
Why this is an OSS story
Personal efficiency is nice; planet-scale efficiency is the pointier goal. If the encoder core is open, inspectable, and cheap to adopt, the wins compound outside my own clusters. That is the honest reason the project sits in public—not because every layer is finished, but because the structure should be shared while it is still possible to steer.