# jxl-rs

8 Hacker News commenters recommended jxl-rs and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** A Rust JPEG XL decoder that people recommend for speed and Rust's memory safety. Critics say the code is still fresh and question its single-core benchmarks.

## Why people recommend it

- Faster than libjxl in tests (4 comments): "Seems to be between a little and a lot faster in almost all of the tests." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49994322)) "jxl-rs is faster since June 2026 (using just a bit more RAM)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49996932)) "jxl-rs started to outperform the C++ library 2 months ago." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49440533))
- Rust calms security concerns (2 comments): "Every `unsafe` function has clearly stated safety requirements, and every `unsafe` blocks justifies why the requirements are met." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46602362)) "Rust certainly calms security fears." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46598825))

## What people warn about

- Young code and development hiatus (2 comments): "I wouldn’t call it mature. Not to say it’s buggy, but most of its code is very fresh." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46725038)) "had a hiatus with zero commits of over 1.5 years until recently iirc" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46112406))
- Single-core benchmarks look misleading (2 comments): "The chart showing jxl-rs taking 1209ms to decode a 5456x3632 image in a single thread is a little damning" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49693499)) "Measuring on a single core is deeply misleading" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49693906))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Jpegli](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jpegli.md): 13 recommend
- [libjxl](https://hackerapproved.com/p/libjxl.md): 9 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "jxl-rs", https://hackerapproved.com/p/jxl-rs/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).