3 ms·
"almost" and "comparable", but xz (lzma) still compresses at a higher ratio, which is still a highly desirable feature. If the decision was being made today, a
by jl6 3y ago
"almost" and "comparable", but xz (lzma) still compresses at a higher ratio, which is still a highly desirable feature.
If the decision was being made today, a good faith debate could be had over whether the distro packaging use case benefits more from faster decompression or smaller file size, but I suspect that, globally, the average PC can decompress xz faster than the average broadband connection can download it.
- lifthrasiir 3y agoI will assume that the average effective broadband connection is about 20 MB/s, and both xz and zstd decompressions are faster than the download under this assumption. But there are lesser known compression algorithms that are more efficient in terms of compression ratio for this target decompression speed, like zpaq [1], which are rarely considered as alternatives. So multiple factors exist here and I believe zstd excels at pretty much every other factor compared to xz, making it a very likely choice. [1] https://mattmahoney.net/dc/zpaq.html https://mattmahoney.net/dc/zpaq.html