alt Hacker NewsSorry, but that is an insanely defeatist attitude blended with a hint of blaming users for wanting features.
Image decoders are pure functions and all should have been rewritten as 100% safe Rust years ago.
Users need functionality.
It’s up to us to figure out how to provide that safely.
Saying to users they shouldn’t have those features isn’t sage advice, it’s admitting failure.
The thing is, nobody's happy just previewing jpegs and pngs.
Before you know it, people want to preview SVGs, PDFs, video, HTML and so on.
And to do that properly means you've got to support obscure formats like JBIG2 and CCITT Fax. Malicious vector images with a billion elements to render. XML that lets one file embed another.
And good luck getting the budget to re-implement them all from scratch in a better language, when the only business value the feature delivers is a postage-stamp-sized preview image.