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Welcome Otto! I know many people including myself are curious on why you wrote this in Pascal? Also, what are the main reasons Pack is faster than the tools y

• OttoCoddo 3y ago
  Thank you! About Pascal: It makes me happy. It looks clean and pseudocode-like. It helps readers from around the world with different languages understand. I am happy that Pack made people curious about this old but great goodie. Speed, Here are some reasons: - Pack does all the steps of pack or unpack (read, check, compress/decompress and write) together and this weaving helped achieve this speed and random access. It is by far the fastest speed I get to see reading or writing random files from file systems, as fast or faster than asynchronous read operations or OVERLAPPED on Windows. To a point, it is limited to file system. For example, on NTFS, Pack can pack Linux code base in around 1.3 s; similar is done on ext4 in 0.96 s. - It is based on a heavily optimized code base, standard library, and the FreePascal compiler, which produces great binary. - Multi core design: even mobiles have multi-core CPUs these days. Choosing threads based on the content and machine, it does not eat your machine. - Speed-configured SQLite. SQLite is much faster than most people think it is. - Configured the already rapid Zstandard. In summary, standing on the shoulders of giants while trying hard to improve reliability, speed and user experience is a sign of respect for them.