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Comment by jamessouth | Hacker News Reader

Great to see the positive comments here. ImageSharp is my baby and it fills me with a lot of confidence that it's something that developers both want and need.

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Why would you expect negative comment? .NET Core is a solid platform for web development. It's easy to deploy and relatively fast compared to the usual Python/Ruby/PHP and co... only matched by Java(controlled by Oracle) and Go(which is obnoxious). .NET Core is growing at a fast pace, and it deserves it, C# and F# are phenomenal languages.

This isn't my first rodeo with Hacker News, I've unfortunately had negative responses before when sharing my work.

Thank you for your work! I used it with a client that had a System.Drawing impl. Just making thumbnails of uploaded images. It actually was our CPU bottleneck! And then it started crashing when load was high, making us drop or reprocess (which added more load and drops...).

With your lib and a few hours of work, all that disappeared and CPU went way down. Thanks!

On a side note, users should try to send gratitude to open source authors in general. I know it's hypocritical of me, since I didn't take the time to email you before this! I've done it a few times in the past and the replies I've received indicated that I was the only one to ever thank them! That sucks. I've written some stuff I know more than a few companies built entire products and services with -- I've received about 2 notes in 6-7 years. It's not much but just a bit of thanks really provided motivation.

Cheers to you.

That's great to hear, With future updates and a little help I'm sure we can improve the performance further and make us the g0-to library.

And thanks for saying thanks, it is rare and always very much appreciated.

It's not exactly difficult to find negative comments for anything on Hacker News.

Cool. I'm assuming you do a lot of matrix operations, so I'm wondering if you've come across the Matrix<> type in Math.Net?; It has plug-in 'providers' for concrete implementations, and there are providers that are backed by Intel MKL, OpenBLAS, ATLAS, CUDA, etc.

If you don't register a provider you just get plain .NET code running serially (though it may user Vector<T> in future versions).

See:

https://github.com/mathnet/mathnet-numerics/tree/master/src/...

Thanks. Didn't know about that library. We do a lot of matrix operations but have so far found System.Numerics.Vectors covers our immediate use cases.

I found that matrix multiplication of dense matrices using MKL was about 60x faster than 'plain' C# code (on a recent core i7 CPU). The Vector<T> class will get you only some of that gain - mainly because MKL uses the FMA CPU instruction (fused multiply and add) that is designed specifically for matrix multiplication, + lots of other optimisations that Intel can make that the .NET jitter can't/won't.

That's some improvement. Will definitely have a proper look.

Great to see a more generic pure-.NET image processing library. When I was doing this 5 years ago we basically had AForge.NET which was focused more on correctness of algorithms than speed. I tried to leverage that, but instead ended up with a totally custom image processing pipeline instead -- oh the battles with the GC and unsafe code...

Out of curiosity what is your overall vision for the library? Are you looking for a System.Drawing high-level API or more of an OpenCV-like low-level API?

I'd say somewhere in between. I've started with a very high level fluent API since I see that as the most common use case but have exposed a couple of important properties that will allow more low-level operations (pointers etc).

I have also created a generic image pipeline Image<TColor> that uses all the packed pixel color models used in XNA and Monogame which make it useful in gaming for loading textures.

The dream is that eventually the community will help port a lot of the algorithms over from libraries like Accord, OpenCV and AForge to allow usage in more scientific scenarios. Some of them will fit in the fluent API most will not but the tools should already be within the library to allow porting and usefulness.

Great work. Seriously. Keep it up.

Cheers, will do!

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