I'm happy to announce the release of bindings to three _stb_ libraries for OCaml.
They are small, self-contained and highly portable: no dependencies, one C file.
They have a well-defined scope and are released into the public domain.
The OCaml bindings are licensed under CC-0.
Stb_truetype is a truetype (*.ttf) font rasterizer.
Stb_image is a JPEG, HDR, PNG, BMP, TGA, PSD, GIF, PIC, PNM image loader.
Stb_image_write is a PNG, BMP, TGA, HDR image writer.
These libraries are originally targeted at game engines.
They offer decent performances while not being optimized to the extreme. In practice, I observed loading times slightly slower than libjpeg-turbo and faster than libjpeg.
The writer doesn't try to compress optimally: you will be able to easily produce image files, but not the smallest possible.
Being self contained, they are easy to deploy and make almost no assumptions on the host system (compared to e.g. CamlImages).
I have successfully used them in conjunction with Tgls,
https://github.com/dbuenzli/tgls , but they can be used in any situation where bigarrays and native C code are allowed.
However, be aware that they don't try to be robust against file corruption (loading might fail) and attacks / forging (libraries are obviously less audited than the common libpng, libjpeg, ...).
They are all available as Opam packages:
opam install stb_image stb_image_write stb_truetype
Webpages:
Issues and pull requests welcomed, although this is a hobby project: I make no guarantee on my ability to respond.
Fred