ZX0 VS TurboBench

I'm working on a game for Amiga (another 68k-based platform) and settled on ZX0 to decompress assets on the fly: https://github.com/einar-saukas/ZX0

I was originally using LZ4, but I switched to ZX0 after learning that it can do in-place decompression, which means I don't have to allocate separate memory for the compressed data. I'm very happy with the compression ratio, and decompression of large assets (~48kb) only takes a few frames on a 7MHz 68000.

Also of note is LZ4W, included in Sega Genesis Dev Kit (and discussed in the comments section of OP's article), a variant of LZ4 that only uses word-aligned operations. That makes it much faster on the 68000, which can struggle to efficiently handle 8-bit data. More info here: https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK/blob/master/bin/lz4w.txt

I'm still unconvinced about this addition. And I don't even dislike Zstandard.

The main motivation seems to be that while Zstandard is worse than Brotli at the highest level, it's substantially faster than Brotli when data has to be compressed on the fly with a limited computation budget. That might be true, but I'm yet to see any concrete or even anecdotal evidence even in the issue tracker [1] while there exist some benchmarks where both Zstandard and Brotli are fast enough for the web usage even at lower levels [2].

According to their FAQ [3] Meta and Akamai have successfully used Zstandard in their internal network, but my gut feeling is that they never actually tried to optimize Brotli instead. In fact, Meta employs the main author of Zstandard so it would have been easier to tune Zstandard instead of Brotli. While Brotli has some fundamental difference from Zstandard (in particular Brotli doesn't use arithmetic-equivalent coding), no one has concretely demonstrated that difference would prevent Brotli from being fast enough for dynamic contents in my opinion.

[1] https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40196713

[2] https://github.com/powturbo/TurboBench/issues/43

[3] https://docs.google.com/document/d/14dbzMpsYPfkefAJos124uPrl...

libdeflate compress better and has faster decompression than igzip.

See the silesia single core in-memory benchmark here [1] comparing zlib,libdeflate,igzip,...

https://github.com/powturbo/TurboBench/issues/4

- https://github.com/powturbo/TurboBench/issues/43

[1] https://github.com/powturbo/TurboBench

Compressesing your sample file, we get 823 bytes with brotli

Download TurboBench and make your own tests:

[1] - https://github.com/powturbo/TurboBench

- igzip 1,2 is best for very fast networks > 10MB/s

brotli bring little value at decompression for users

[1] https://github.com/powturbo/TurboBench

[1] https://sites.google.com/site/powturbo/home/web-compression

[2] https://encode.su/threads/2333-TurboBench-Back-to-the-future...

Build or download TurboBench [1] executables for linux and windows from releases [2] ans make your own tests comparing oodle,zstd and other compressors.

[1] https://github.com/powturbo/TurboBench

[2] https://github.com/powturbo/TurboBench/releases