This is extremely misleading. Before they even started work on the Rust-based decoder, experimental JPEG XL support was added to Chrome and Firefox using the reference C++ implementation. Chrome later removed this support for very dubious claims of lack of interest and improvement over previous generation of codecs.

Around that time, Safari shipped JPEG XL support in production, still without the Rust implementation. So the assertion no one wanted to touch it is plain false.

It was actually Mozilla who, a long time after stating they were ambivalent on JPEG XL, brought up memory safety as a major consideration, for the very first time. That’s when the work on the Rust implementation started.

Since the format continued to be more and more supported and talked about, it’s hard to say what exactly were the factors which made Google reconsider their stance. The notion that somehow everyone was super worried about memory safety from the very beginning, and once the JXL team fixed that, everyone was happy to embrace it, seems to come up a lot lately, but it’s terribly distorted and simply not true.

Not necessarily. What’s annoying is these low-effort posts that bring nothing. In some contexts the discussion is worth having, but we can do better than "it’s bad because it’s not in my pet language" groupthink.

It was a dishonest effort that actually undermined the memory safety pitch.

They say it is 5% slower. That's close enough. I know they say it isn't but in reality that speed difference is just going to be used as an excuse by the anti-Rust crowd.