General compression algorithms like zstd will do way, way better on previously encoded data. Sorting, RLE, etc, are all going to lead to a smaller resulting bin

General compression algorithms like zstd will do way, way better on previously encoded data. Sorting, RLE, etc, are all going to lead to a smaller resulting binary after going through the generalized algorithm. You're also going to be relying on heuristics that may fail. Zstd has no idea that your UUIDs are going to repeat, it doesn't know to dictionary encode them or to create frequency mappings. What it ends up doing is unlikely to be as effective as doing the work ahead of time, then allowing zstd to find the interesting and complex patterns that arise out of your encoded format.