This is not a complete JPEG implementation (e.g. it does not handle
progressive JPEGs or restart markers), but I was able to take a photo
with my phone, and view the resultant JPEG in pure Go.
The decoder is simple, but slow. The Huffman decoder in particular
should be easily improvable, but optimization is left to future
changelists. Being able to inline functions in the inner loop should
also help performance.
The output is not pixel-for-pixel identical to libjpeg, although
identical behavior isn't necessarily a goal, since JPEG is a lossy
codec. There are at least two reasons for the discrepancy.
First, the inverse DCT algorithm used is the same as Plan9's
src/cmd/jpg, which has different rounding errors from libjpeg's
default IDCT implementation. Note that libjpeg actually has three
different IDCT implementations: one floating point, and two fixed
point. Out of those four, Plan9's seemed the simplest to understand,
partly because it has no #ifdef's or C macros.
Second, for 4:2:2 or 4:2:0 chroma sampling, this implementation does
nearest neighbor upsampling, compared to libjpeg's triangle filter
(e.g. see h2v1_fancy_upsample in jdsample.c).
The difference from the first reason is typically zero, but sometimes
1 (out of 256) in YCbCr space, or double that in RGB space. The
difference from the second reason can be as large as 8/256 in YCbCr
space, in regions of steep chroma gradients. Informal eyeballing
suggests that the net difference is typically imperceptible, though.