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I agree there ought to be a human readable prefix. Zurl is not bad! I don't think compression can really compete with a hash table for key size. Because they'r
by 19eightyfour 9y ago
I agree there ought to be a human readable prefix. Zurl is not bad!
I don't think compression can really compete with a hash table for key size. Because they're different beasts: compression finds the smallest representation for the entropy present in one text, hashing sort of finds the smallest distinguishable key for the entropy of the whole table space. Whatever that means! I'm no expert.
But competing can be a fun exercise to try get this to be smaller. And I've included versioning prefix bits so we know which version of the compression we're using.
So you can say it's sort of trying to compete with the hash table URL shorteners. It's not really, it's sort of trying to do something different as well. I just wanted something like a space efficient transport format for URLs that was going to just do better than base64 expanding them. And I liked that I send them a anywhere in an opaque block. That's pretty much all. Other motivations like we can avoid relying on an arbitrarily sized and growing database, swap that out for relying on a piece of distributable code, are sort of motivations, too.
But having the kind of fake-comparison Benchmark performance of URL shortner I think is also useful motivation to try to make this most space efficient as well. So I don't want to say that it's not competing because I think it's a use for motivation to try to get this shorter.