malcolm

Many years ago, Jeroen Fokker wrote a "Functional Specification of the JPEG algorithm, and an Implementation for Free". It was great on clarity - really helped me to understand the codec - but totally sucked on performance. With all the recent activity in making pure Haskell libraries with decent speed, utilising fusion and other optimisation techniques, I'm wondering whether it is time to revisit that paper, and see whether we can keep the high-level specificational style, but do rather better on all that number-crunching. In fact, after JPEG, why not take a look at something more challenging, like specifying/implementing the H.264 or Ogg Theora video codecs?