Comment by okamiueru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by okamiueru | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

From a codec perspective gifs would be the first thing that came to mind for a poorly optimized format. The only thing it has going for it is simplicity. This is a bit besides the point you're making, but I did a double take at seeing the words "gif" and "pretty optimized" together. I'm also curious as to what this has to do with M1 in particular. Looks to be like a memory allocation issue in the decoder library. But hard to tell given the amount of information given. Memory leaks tend to be boundless, but increasing, so the op statement of a fixed memory usage kinda sounds more like poorly optimized allocations, rather than non-properly-cleared up allocations. Though, could also be a mix of everything.

"Optimized" in this sense meant that animated gifs can have a frame reference only three pixels of the original image. So an image of 300K with only small movement (think cinemagraphs) wouldn't be much larger.

This is a given for movie formats, but at the time the animated GIF came up it was revolutionary. I think the proper phrase should be "animated GIFs can be pretty optimized, taking into account how inefficient the algorithm is, when compared with other animation algorithms of the time".

I also think there's an interpretation that applies here: When you see an animated gif, even if it's a frame that changes three pixels and nothing else, internally the renderer may be expanding it into a full movie (that is, uncompressing each resulting "frame"). This usually makes GIFs (regardless of how large or small the GIF actually is) take much more memory than common sense would tell you.

That's "compressed," not "optimized".

GIF also uses a normal compression algorithm so saying “compressed” about frame deltas is unhelpful.

For an image codec I think of those as the same thing. What do you mean by optimized besides compression?

Isn't that just... optimizing for space?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com