LZW and GIF explained

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  1. brotli

    Brotli compression format

    ...though with the slightly unexpected side effect (for Brotli, at least) that your executable may end up containing (~200KB, from memory) of very unexpected plain text strings which might (& has[0]) lead to questions from software end-users asking why your software contains "random"[1] text (including potentially "culturally sensitive" words/phrases related to religion such as "Holy Roman Emperor", "Muslims", "dollars", "emacs"[2] or similar).

    (I encountered this aspect while investigating potential size optimization opportunities for the Godot game engine's web/WASM builds--though presumably the Brotli dictionary compresses well if the transfer encoding is... Brotli. :D )

    [0] "This needs to be reviewed immediately #876": https://github.com/google/brotli/issues/876

    [1] Which, regardless of meaning, certainly bears similarities to the type of "unexpected weird text" commonly/normally associated with spam, malware, LLMs and other entities of ill repute.

    [2] The final example may not actually be factual. :)

  2. InfluxDB

    InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.

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  3. Tiny-GIF

    Thanks for reminding me I implemented this 10 years ago. Here it is in 180 lines of C https://github.com/fsmv/Tiny-GIF/blob/master/src/LZW.c

  4. LzwGifTools

    A C# 8.0 LZW compression library

    Speak of the devil! I also cited Matthew's specific blog post in my LZW GIF encoder implementation: https://github.com/alexqfredrickson/LzwGifTools

  5. vcvj

    A C# 8.0 framework for tokenization/transformation of GIF files

    Also, nifty: https://github.com/alexqfredrickson/vcvj :)

    (I've done some VJing in my time, so it's always cool to see related projects--I particularly like the effect on the ping-pong ball in the examples with its bounce path trail. :) )

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