5 ms·

Oh interesting! Good to know

• hinkley 5y ago
  That property came back into use when we crossed the 2GB and then 4GB threshold for archives, because the TOC uses a 32 bit integer to reference backward into the file. A lot of implementations used a signed int, and even when they fixed it, organic growth in bandwidth and thus content size ran you into the wall in another couple of years. We had collectively mostly supported UTF-8 filenames around that same time period, so it was going from one problem to the next (or choosing between implementations that had fixed one but not the other). For the 32 bit address problem, you could read forward from the front, and as long as no entry was over 4GB, you could still read the file. If the file count was low enough you could cache all of the entry objects, and if reads dominated opens, then you were functionally back to O(1) access (but O(n) startup). There was a 64 bit extension going around, but when I stopped working with zip files every day I stopped tracking the progress.