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An ode to bzip
The story goes like this. ComputerCraft is a mod that adds programming to Minecraft. You write Lua code that gets executed by a bespoke interpreter with access to world APIs, and now you’re writing code instead of having fun. Computers have limited disk space, and my /nix folder is growing out of control, so I need to compress code. The laziest option would be to use LibDeflate, but its decoder is larger than both the gains from compression and my personal boundary for copying code. So the question becomes: what’s the shortest, simplest, most ratio-efficient compression algorithm? I initially thought this was a complex question full of tradeoffs, but it turns out it’s very clear-cut. My answer is bzip, even though this algorithm has been critiqued multiple times and has fallen into obscurity since xz and zstd became popular.
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