4 ms·

Looks very interesting, however I'm not impressed by the name. "Zstandard"??? With ".zstd" as the extension? I don't like it. They should have named it lette

Looks very interesting, however I'm not impressed by the name. "Zstandard"??? With ".zstd" as the extension? I don't like it. They should have named it letter-zip, along the lines of gzip, bzip, and xzip, with the extension letterz. "fz" would have been a good one since they work at Facebook.

levbrie 10y ago
Agreed. How did they not call it "Pied Piper"?
- ryeguy_24 10y ago
  I was waiting for that reference.
VanillaCafe 10y ago
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  This isn't bikeshedding. Bikeshedding is about quibbling over unimportant details. Names are critically and absolutely important. Lots of great things have been hobbled or ruined by poorly-chosen names. A terrible name can cause something worthy to be ignored in favor of something inferior but with a better name. And you don't need to even be competent in the inner workings of a project to criticize its name or suggest better ones. The people who name cars aren't the same people who design the engine-control algorithms for them. If you disagree, what do you think of naming your kid "Adolph Hitler [lastname]"? Most people agree that a name like that will cause great harm to a child growing up because of the constant ridicule and ostracization he'd inevitably face. That's an extreme example, but names are important. Note that I don't think this project's name is horrible, but I don't think it's very good either, and could be a lot better.
  - Blaisorblade0 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law ? :-D
niftich 10y ago
It used to be called just 'zstd' but I guess that wasn't very pronounceable.
- wvenable 10y ago
  Zesty!
  - caf 10y ago
    Zed-Stud
rspeer 10y ago
...yeah, why didn't they claim part of a namespace that only has room for 26 (or 36) things? Everyone else is doing it!
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  I don't see the problem: only 3 members of that namespace are currently claimed (4 out of the 36-member namespace: 7z), so we have room for 23 (or 32) more compression standards before running out. We've been using gzip for, what, 20 years now? Only recently have we gotten xz. At this rate, we won't run out of compression standards using this scheme for roughly 153 years. And after that, we could always start using capital Zs, like the old "compress" standard that used the .Z extension. Or we could go to a 3-letter extension ending in z, such as ".fbz", which gives you 676 more options, and 4507 years. Considering that general-purpose data compression really hasn't moved that much since the DEFLATE algorithm took over, and only recently had any real change with the advent of LZMA (used in p7zip and xz), and perhaps this new zstd (too soon to tell), my time estimates here are probably too short.
  - twic 10y ago
    Perhaps we should require the less common algorithms to have a longer prefix.
    - Grishnakh 10y ago
      There's no way to know what's going to be a common algorithm in the future unless you have a time machine. When DEFLATE was first invented, it wasn't common either, it was brand-new. Now it's everywhere. This new algorithm might become just as ubiquitous in 10 years, or it might turn into the next bzip2, or worse, the next ZOO.
      - twic 10y ago
        You're right, of course. So we should base it on how common the algorithm was in the compressions we've done so far. (I am not sure if i need to clarify that my original comment was meant to be a joke about Huffman coding)

levbrie 10y ago

Agreed. How did they not call it "Pied Piper"?

ryeguy_24 10y ago
I was waiting for that reference.

VanillaCafe 10y ago

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding

Grishnakh 10y ago
This isn't bikeshedding. Bikeshedding is about quibbling over unimportant details. Names are critically and absolutely important. Lots of great things have been hobbled or ruined by poorly-chosen names. A terrible name can cause something worthy to be ignored in favor of something inferior but with a better name. And you don't need to even be competent in the inner workings of a project to criticize its name or suggest better ones. The people who name cars aren't the same people who design the engine-control algorithms for them. If you disagree, what do you think of naming your kid "Adolph Hitler [lastname]"? Most people agree that a name like that will cause great harm to a child growing up because of the constant ridicule and ostracization he'd inevitably face. That's an extreme example, but names are important. Note that I don't think this project's name is horrible, but I don't think it's very good either, and could be a lot better.
- Blaisorblade0 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law ? :-D

niftich 10y ago

It used to be called just 'zstd' but I guess that wasn't very pronounceable.

wvenable 10y ago
Zesty!
- caf 10y ago
  Zed-Stud

rspeer 10y ago

...yeah, why didn't they claim part of a namespace that only has room for 26 (or 36) things? Everyone else is doing it!

Grishnakh 10y ago
I don't see the problem: only 3 members of that namespace are currently claimed (4 out of the 36-member namespace: 7z), so we have room for 23 (or 32) more compression standards before running out. We've been using gzip for, what, 20 years now? Only recently have we gotten xz. At this rate, we won't run out of compression standards using this scheme for roughly 153 years. And after that, we could always start using capital Zs, like the old "compress" standard that used the .Z extension. Or we could go to a 3-letter extension ending in z, such as ".fbz", which gives you 676 more options, and 4507 years. Considering that general-purpose data compression really hasn't moved that much since the DEFLATE algorithm took over, and only recently had any real change with the advent of LZMA (used in p7zip and xz), and perhaps this new zstd (too soon to tell), my time estimates here are probably too short.
- twic 10y ago
  Perhaps we should require the less common algorithms to have a longer prefix.
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    There's no way to know what's going to be a common algorithm in the future unless you have a time machine. When DEFLATE was first invented, it wasn't common either, it was brand-new. Now it's everywhere. This new algorithm might become just as ubiquitous in 10 years, or it might turn into the next bzip2, or worse, the next ZOO.
    - twic 10y ago
      You're right, of course. So we should base it on how common the algorithm was in the compressions we've done so far. (I am not sure if i need to clarify that my original comment was meant to be a joke about Huffman coding)