zlib-ng
fpc
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zlib-ng
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Show HN: Pzip- blazing fast concurrent zip archiver and extractor
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.
- Intel QuickAssist Technology Zstandard Plugin for Zstandard
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Introducing zune-inflate: The fastest Rust implementation of gzip/Zlib/DEFLATE
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.
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Zlib Critical Vulnerability
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.
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Git’s database internals II: commit history queries
I wonder if zlib-ng would make a difference, since it has a lot of optimizations for modern hardware.
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Computing Adler32 Checksums at 41 GB/s
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.
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Convenient CPU feature detection and dispatch in the Magnum Engine
zlib-ng: https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng/blob/develop/functable.c
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games-emulation/dolphin-9999 is failing to build because devs switched to minizip-ng and zlib uses minizip. I'm not sure how to get it to build now, details in post.
(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
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Re: Zlib memory corruption on deflate (i.e. compress)
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.
fpc
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Is Fortran "A Dead Language"?
Looking at the activity on the Free Pascal compiler[0] compared to some other, non-dead languages like Crystal[1], I would say Pascal isn't dead.
They had a major release to their most popular IDE just a few weeks ago[2].
A lot of these projects built with FP aren't as visible in the HN community, because they related to different hobbyist fields, aren't keystone components in the startup ecosystem etc. But they for sure exist.
- Niklaus Wirth Passed Away
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I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)
Free Pascal has fcl-web which should provide a HTTP/HTTPS client (among other things, it can be used to make web apps), though it comes with libcurl bindings out of the box so you could also use that too. fcl-json provides a JSON parser. FWIW "fcl" means "Free Component Library" which contains various tools (mainly exposed as classes).
The packages[0] directory of FPC contains a lot of stuff that come out of the box with the compiler and they often have an "examples" and/or "tests" directory with code you can check. There is some documentation[1] but sadly FCL is really not that well documented - you just have to check the sources for most things.
Note that this is for Free Pascal itself. Lazarus builds on it (LCL, the "Lazarus Component Library", is built on top of FCL) and adds a bunch of additional components of its own. Though usually for non-GUI stuff you just use the Free Pascal classes, Lazarus has some of its own "wrappers" that integrate with the IDE and the form/object designer. The "weblaz" package (it comes with Lazarus but you need to install it manually from Package -> Install/Uninstall Packages) provides a bunch of components for working with the web (mainly for making web apps), including the "TFPHttpClient" component which can be used to make HTTP requests. As a simple example, if you throw a TMemo (multiline text editor) control in a form, throw a TFPHttpClient component and then doubleclick on the form to edit the code to execute during the form's creation you can type "Memo1.Text:=FPHTTPClient1.Get('https://news.ycombinator.com/');" and it will put the HTML code for this forum in the memo (note that you may also need to add the opensslsockets unit in the uses section at the top of the code). Of course that is a very simple example but if you browse the properties and events of the component in the object inspector as well as the available methods by typing "FPHTTPClient1." and pressing ctrl+space in the code editor you can find most of the other functionality the component provides.
[0] https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/tree/main/pac...
[1] https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/current/fcl/index.html
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Web target – progress and plans
We’ve encountered FPC issue #40229 (Wasm32 symbol xxx without index value error) but it is now happily fixed :) Many thanks go to Nikolay Nikolov from FPC team for fixing, and Andrzej Kilijański for preparing a code to easily reproduce the issue.
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CSVDocument Unit
No sure what you mean with "some sight", but the whole source code can be found here: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/blob/main/packages/fcl-base/src/csvdocument.pp
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The project with a single 11,000-line code file
In Pascal that is really common, since the files are the modules. You publish your library as one file, and the user can import it by the file name.
I ran wc on FreePascal to search for some. There are a few, but not as many as I expected.
9k file, data structures for the compiler itself: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/blob/main/./c...
30k file: Pascal parser/scope resolver: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/blob/main/pac...
And the record:
119k file, Sharepoint API (but it seems to be autogenerated): https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/blob/main/pac...
As far as libraries go, this is one of my favorites:
23k file, regular expression library: https://github.com/BeRo1985/flre/blob/master/src/FLRE.pas
I searched my own files and found a 197k file to parse HTML entities. But that was an autogenerated trie (one switch/case for each letter)
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Re: Zlib memory corruption on deflate (i.e. compress)
I wonder if FreePascal is affected
Looks like they ported zlib to Pascal in 1998 and left it pretty much unchanged:
https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/blob/main/pac...
What are some alternatives?
zstd - Zstandard - Fast real-time compression algorithm
elf
ZLib - A massively spiffy yet delicately unobtrusive compression library.
CPython - The Python programming language
Minizip-ng - Fork of the popular zip manipulation library found in the zlib distribution.
Celeste - Celeste Bugs & Issue Tracker + some Source Code
libdeflate - Heavily optimized library for DEFLATE/zlib/gzip compression and decompression
castle-engine - Cross-platform (desktop, mobile, console) 3D and 2D game engine supporting many asset formats (X3D, glTF, Spine...) and using modern Object Pascal
brotli - Brotli compression format
TypeScript - TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that compiles to clean JavaScript output.
uzlib - Radically unbloated DEFLATE/zlib/gzip compression/decompression library. Can decompress any gzip/zlib data, and offers simplified compressor which produces gzip-compatible output, while requiring much less resources (and providing less compression ratio of course).
.NET Runtime - .NET is a cross-platform runtime for cloud, mobile, desktop, and IoT apps.