isa-l VS zlib-ng

For using accelerators (QAT, I assume, because the article is about this) from the CLI, then QATzip[3] comes with a command line tool qatzip which can be used as described in the project ReadMe. I didn't test it, though, as I have no QAT-enabled device.

[1] https://github.com/intel/isa-l/tree/master/igzip

Ex 1: https://github.com/intel/isa-l/blob/master/README.md

Examples: - Someone I know created machine-optimized library in c and asm to accelerate compression, erasure coding, and encryption on Intel Xeon CPUs (https://github.com/intel/isa-l) which runs those ops WAY faster than the standard linux libraries. - My friend is making a retro SEGA genesis game using a C and asm dev kit (https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK)

igzip (https://github.com/intel/isa-l) is much faster than gzip or pigz when it comes to decompression, 2-3x in my experience. There is also a Python module (isal) that provides a GzipFile-like wrapper class, for an easy speed-up of Python scripts that read gzipped files.

However, it only supports up to level 3 when compressing data, so it can't be used as a drop-in replacement for gzip. You also need to make sure to use the latest version if you are going to use it in the context of bioinformatics, since older versions choke on concatenated gzip files common in that field.

Please note that allowing for 2% bigger resulting file could mean huge speedup in these circumstances even with the same compression routines, seeing these benchmarks of zlib and zlib-ng for different compression levels:

https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng/discussions/871

IMO the fair comparison of the real speed improvement brought by a new program is only between the almost identical resulting compressed sizes.

It is much faster than miniz_oxide and all other safe-Rust implementations, and consistently beats even Zlib. The performance is roughly on par with zlib-ng - sometimes faster, sometimes slower. It is not (yet) as fast as the original libdeflate in C.

Zlib-ng doesn't contain the same code, but it appears that their equivalent inflate() when used with their inflateGetHeader() implementation was affected by a similar problem: https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng/pull/1328

Also similarly, most client code will be unaffected because `state->head` will be NULL, because they (most client code) won't have used inflateGetHeader() at all.

I wonder if zlib-ng would make a difference, since it has a lot of optimizations for modern hardware.

https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng/discussions/871

zlib-ng also has adler32 implementations optimized for various architectures: https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng

Might be interesting to benchmark their implementation too to see how it compares.

zlib-ng: https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng/blob/develop/functable.c

(2) There are many packages that rely upon zlib and minizip and switching those underlying dependencies is easier said than done. We can't drop zlib completely and switch: "The idea of zlib-ng is not to replace zlib, but to co-exist as a drop-in replacement with a lower threshold for code change." - https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng

There are already active zlib forks (e.g. https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng), the problem is with having people move to them. It takes a lot of effort to move mindshare from the original version to a fork, there's some historical examples of it happening, but not a ton.