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Actually, I've argued the opposite in the past. Any file that is of any significant size is already compressed: images, audio, video, gifs, PDFs, game map/save

by Aachen 6y ago

Actually, I've argued the opposite in the past. Any file that is of any significant size is already compressed: images, audio, video, gifs, PDFs, game map/save data... even documents (and by extension, spreadsheets and presentations) are compressed these days (because they're... zips! It's zips all the way down). Compression in your zip archive implementation is unnecessary complexity at this point. Compressing archives most only makes sense if you have some huge (many many millions of lines) set of source code because that's a lot of data, more than one file that you want to compress, and low entropy in those files. Only in that combination does zip with compression make sense over uncompressed archives or compression without archive format. Of course, zip can shoehorn both functions that you usually don't need together into one format and we're usually not CPU-bound anyway so I totally see why you might as well always apply a small amount of compression, but I would beg to differ if you say "it's basically useless to have zip without compression support". There are more cases where zip with compression is completely redundant than cases where it helps you.

duskwuff 6y ago
> even documents (and by extension, spreadsheets and presentations) are compressed these days (because they're... zips! It's zips all the way down) And how do you read those archives (or, for that matter, create them) using a ZIP library that doesn't know how to deal with compressed data? My point is simply that DEFLATE support should be considered mandatory for any ZIP implementation. Without it, most archives you encounter will be unreadable. Yes, it can still handle archives which contain only STOREd files -- but that's an edge case which most archives won't fall into.
- masklinn 6y ago
  > And how do you read those archives (or, for that matter, create them) using a ZIP library that doesn't know how to deal with compressed data? You don’t because you just want to archive them not read them.

by Aachen 6y ago

duskwuff 6y ago

> even documents (and by extension, spreadsheets and presentations) are compressed these days (because they're... zips! It's zips all the way down) And how do you read those archives (or, for that matter, create them) using a ZIP library that doesn't know how to deal with compressed data? My point is simply that DEFLATE support should be considered mandatory for any ZIP implementation. Without it, most archives you encounter will be unreadable. Yes, it can still handle archives which contain only STOREd files -- but that's an edge case which most archives won't fall into.

masklinn 6y ago
> And how do you read those archives (or, for that matter, create them) using a ZIP library that doesn't know how to deal with compressed data? You don’t because you just want to archive them not read them.