You can use the Get My Shortcuts action to retrieve a shortcut as a file, and then rename it so that its extension is .plist. A shortcut is just a glorified property list (plist), which can be represented as XML (there’s also a binary format that Apple uses a lot) or converted to JSON (not always easily, but shortcuts don’t have any values that would be incompatible with JSON). I like to convert shortcuts to JSON... Source: over 2 years ago

This is interesting from the standpoint of how new JVM features can be used to improve performance (what I presume the article's main purpose to have been), but the image processing improvement itself isn't head-turning. Also, we've found that libjpeg-turbo (https://libjpeg-turbo.org/) is ~5x (IIRC, can re-run my JMH benchmark if anyone wants me to) as fast for decoding JPEGs as ImageIO, so we wouldn't even... Source: over 1 year ago

For all but the simplest formats (basically BMP), the difficulty of implementing encoding/decoding from scratch is significant - well beyond a beginner's ability, and challenging/time-consuming even for senior developers. So, libraries are used in practice - e.g. Libpng and libjpeg-turbo. Source: over 2 years ago