WebP support on desktop

[javagl]

It looks like there is no support for WebP images on the desktop

(There is the AndroidBufferImageLoader that supports WebP, but it looks like this is only for Android)

I've been using https://github.com/sejda-pdf/webp-imageio for reading/writing WepP recently. It has a Maven Central release. And it seemed to work smoothly.

Is there any reason to not add WebP support based on this?

(One reason is that it could be a low-hanging fruit, and allow supporting the EXT_texture_webp extension of glTF)

[riccardobl]

I use a mix of webp-imageio and AndroidBufferImageLoader to load webps on a fork of jme, but the issue is that webp-imageio uses awt, and this causes graalvm builds to be very big and even unstable on macos.
AWT is also a huge dependency, so in jme we've been trying to reduce our exposure to it during the years.
On top of that the library is also native, so we would need to extend it to build the missing targets (eg. arm).

I've recently used codex to translate a smaller rust webp decoder to pure java: image-webp-java, needs some human review, but it seems like a promising way to get have a single crossplatform webp loader.

That said, IMO webp support is useful, so i support any effort in that direction

[javagl]

I don't know the intricacies of the build process and what the role of AWT/GraalVM is at this point. But I'm aware of some of the issues that may come with native libraries (like the missing ARM binaries here).

Maybe that linked project can be the solution here, but I have not yet investigated the stability and maturity of the underlying Rust project, or which issues might come with the automatic translation.

It may not be "highest priority" in many ways, but I noticed that WebP is used more frequently, and I could imagine that people will sooner or later use it (and expect it to be supported) as casually as they now use PNG or JPG.