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Would you say there are real CS advances when it comes to LZ family compression algorithms and containers? Wasn't LZ well known prior to the past 10 years? An
by ThenAsNow 6y ago
Would you say there are real CS advances when it comes to LZ family compression algorithms and containers? Wasn't LZ well known prior to the past 10 years? And is there any kind of fundamental or theoretical advancement in containers, or is this an example of a new(er) type of implementation?
- hinkley 6y agoI think they're solving a different problem now. Zip was an ahead-of-time compression algorithm until HTTP 1.1, and so the draw was storage and transmission bandwidth, but the deciding factor was decompression time and space complexity. Now we've been using it for online compression so long, and bandwidth is a secondary concern. Eventually someone had to take the other constraints seriously. We made LZO and friends but the results weren't that exciting, and I think a lot of people wandered off for another 10 years to work on other things, until bandwidth became a bigger concern for producers than consumers. For containers, I'd love to talk to some mainframe OS designers about how much of containers and The Cloud are merely democratizing techniques that were proven out on big iron 30 years ago. I suspect the answer is "a lot".