FFmpeg's April Fools: Moving to Rust, 10x Slower, For Your Safety
Description
A screenshot of an April 1st (01 Apr 26, 612K views) tweet from the verified FFmpeg account (@FFmpeg) announcing: 'FFmpeg is moving to Rust 🦀. Our use of C and Assembly in FFmpeg has been an unacceptable violation of safety. FFmpeg will be running 10x slower - but we're doing it for your safety. All your videos will appear green - safety first, working software later.' The post shows 1,716 reposts, 456 quotes, 19.7K likes, 1,475 bookmarks. The top reply from CobaltDragon piles on: 'Could you please also fragment the release builds into at least 20 executables in a nested...' The joke skewers the Rewrite-It-In-Rust evangelism aimed at FFmpeg - a project famous for hand-tuned C and SIMD assembly whose maintainers have publicly defended assembly optimizations - sarcastically trading performance and correctness (green corrupted video frames) for 'safety'
Comments
2Comment deleted
The borrow checker finally found a buffer overflow in FFmpeg - it was the maintainers' patience with reply guys suggesting the rewrite
Every frame now has exactly one owner; unfortunately, it's the green channel.