4 ms·

(I know this article isn't actually about rar, but...) It's surprising that anyone still cares about the rar file format. lzma, as used in .7z, has superior co

(I know this article isn't actually about rar, but...) It's surprising that anyone still cares about the rar file format. lzma, as used in .7z, has superior compression, and neither are particularly fast so it's not about performance. 7-Zip is BSD licensed and has a native Windows UI.

theonemind 1y ago
WinRAR has a lot of great features as an archiver and compressor. It can create parity archives, and has a lot of other great features if you look at the manual Granted it doesn’t have compression advantage over 7z, but those flags and features look great when I want to create archives, generally better and more convenient than anything else I look at, but I usually end up going with plain old zip files since various utilities can scan and search through them, etc., a network effect win for the zip format. But it also underscores that the best compression ratio doesn’t count for that much for me and some other people
- UberFly 1y ago
  Well said. The ability to embed a recovery record for really important stuff and the command line support is enough for me to keep using Winrar forever.
sureIy 1y ago
"Best" doesn't always win. We'd be sporting PalmOS if that were the case.
- 9dev 1y ago
  Im just now writing a MOBI parser, which are just Palm Database Format files effectively, and if that is any indication, I’m fairly sure PalmOS is very far from the best option available.
wongarsu 1y ago
The difference in compression isn't that big. Just ran a test on some random 1GB plain-text file I had lying around. Both on the highest compression level at a dictionary size that uses about 5.5GB of RAM to compress (since that's what 128MB dictionary size uses in 7zip, the Winrar equivalent are 916MB, more than what's useful for this file). The result was 7zip compressing the file down to 225MB in 9 minutes and WinRAR compressing it to 239MB in 2 minutes. That's a 6% difference, at a considerable speed cost. Not a scientific benchmark, but I think it underlines general point. If I want the best results I use a .tar.xz at insane compression levels, or more commonly a .tar.zstd if I want good decompression speed. The usecase for 7zip and WinRar is convenience, ease of use and windows-native file handling instead of the unix-focused .tar format. WinRar wins out on all three of those. 7zip's gui is a worse clone of WinRar's, archive creation has a fraction of the features, windows-specific file handling is an afterthought at best (winrar has handling for the archive flag, alternate data streams, file security, hard links, etc). And most important of all rar is built as an archive format. You get built-in recovery records, and hashes are stored as blake2 hashes instead of the frankly insufficient crc32 hashes 7zip uses. I'd give 7zip points if it had a better (== more familiar) CLI, but they made the bizarre decision to copy winrar's cli too and make even worse documentation for it. The only things it has going for it are a linux UI and the open-source license
- whyoh 1y ago
  Well, another advantage that 7-zip has is in the update mode (CLI); unlike WinRAR, it can handle deleted files as well. So it lets you make proper differential backups (snapshots of a folder, for instance), recreating the original state when restoring.
encom 1y ago
A few things. People care because RAR is ancient, and there are a lot of RAR-archives in the wild. And also WinRAR has resisted enshittification - it's a very well made piece of software that has had a mostly stable UI. It works, and works well, so why change? About lzma, I believe zst beats it on every metric. I resisted it for a while, because it's tainted by Facebook, but I can't argue with the results.
- LeoPanthera 1y ago
  > About lzma, I believe zst beats it on every metric Performance, yes. But not compression. lzma compresses much smaller than zstd.
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    In default settings ZSTD favors speed. In max settings they are often about the same in both compression and speed e.g. https://dwaves.de/2023/10/16/gnu-linux-bash-maximum-best-compression-for-binary-data-xz-lzma-vs-zstd-vs-7zip-7z-vs-parallel-multi-threaded-multi-core-bzip2-why-it-is-better-to-have-a-lot-of-swap-space-ram-3x-or-4x/ https://dwaves.de/2023/10/16/gnu-linux-bash-maximum-best-com... There was a particularly good benchmark comparison of the two which put them on a Pareto front of speed vs size from different levels over each on some different sources but I can't find that. ZSTD was ahead most of the time.
theandrewbailey 1y ago
7z has recently started supporting zstd compression, so you can compress much faster (though not as much).
- zamadatix 1y ago
  Which version added the ZSTD compression? I think decompression was 24.01
  - theandrewbailey 1y ago
    I know that Peazip can compress 7z archives with zstd. https://peazip.github.io/ https://peazip.github.io/
mystified5016 1y ago
I can't recall the last time I saw a .rar in the wild. Probably would have been at the end of my teenage piracy years, between windows 7 and 8.

theonemind 1y ago

WinRAR has a lot of great features as an archiver and compressor. It can create parity archives, and has a lot of other great features if you look at the manual Granted it doesn’t have compression advantage over 7z, but those flags and features look great when I want to create archives, generally better and more convenient than anything else I look at, but I usually end up going with plain old zip files since various utilities can scan and search through them, etc., a network effect win for the zip format. But it also underscores that the best compression ratio doesn’t count for that much for me and some other people

UberFly 1y ago
Well said. The ability to embed a recovery record for really important stuff and the command line support is enough for me to keep using Winrar forever.

sureIy 1y ago

"Best" doesn't always win. We'd be sporting PalmOS if that were the case.

9dev 1y ago
Im just now writing a MOBI parser, which are just Palm Database Format files effectively, and if that is any indication, I’m fairly sure PalmOS is very far from the best option available.

wongarsu 1y ago

The difference in compression isn't that big. Just ran a test on some random 1GB plain-text file I had lying around. Both on the highest compression level at a dictionary size that uses about 5.5GB of RAM to compress (since that's what 128MB dictionary size uses in 7zip, the Winrar equivalent are 916MB, more than what's useful for this file). The result was 7zip compressing the file down to 225MB in 9 minutes and WinRAR compressing it to 239MB in 2 minutes. That's a 6% difference, at a considerable speed cost. Not a scientific benchmark, but I think it underlines general point. If I want the best results I use a .tar.xz at insane compression levels, or more commonly a .tar.zstd if I want good decompression speed. The usecase for 7zip and WinRar is convenience, ease of use and windows-native file handling instead of the unix-focused .tar format. WinRar wins out on all three of those. 7zip's gui is a worse clone of WinRar's, archive creation has a fraction of the features, windows-specific file handling is an afterthought at best (winrar has handling for the archive flag, alternate data streams, file security, hard links, etc). And most important of all rar is built as an archive format. You get built-in recovery records, and hashes are stored as blake2 hashes instead of the frankly insufficient crc32 hashes 7zip uses. I'd give 7zip points if it had a better (== more familiar) CLI, but they made the bizarre decision to copy winrar's cli too and make even worse documentation for it. The only things it has going for it are a linux UI and the open-source license

whyoh 1y ago
Well, another advantage that 7-zip has is in the update mode (CLI); unlike WinRAR, it can handle deleted files as well. So it lets you make proper differential backups (snapshots of a folder, for instance), recreating the original state when restoring.

encom 1y ago

A few things. People care because RAR is ancient, and there are a lot of RAR-archives in the wild. And also WinRAR has resisted enshittification - it's a very well made piece of software that has had a mostly stable UI. It works, and works well, so why change? About lzma, I believe zst beats it on every metric. I resisted it for a while, because it's tainted by Facebook, but I can't argue with the results.

LeoPanthera 1y ago
> About lzma, I believe zst beats it on every metric Performance, yes. But not compression. lzma compresses much smaller than zstd.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  In default settings ZSTD favors speed. In max settings they are often about the same in both compression and speed e.g. https://dwaves.de/2023/10/16/gnu-linux-bash-maximum-best-compression-for-binary-data-xz-lzma-vs-zstd-vs-7zip-7z-vs-parallel-multi-threaded-multi-core-bzip2-why-it-is-better-to-have-a-lot-of-swap-space-ram-3x-or-4x/ https://dwaves.de/2023/10/16/gnu-linux-bash-maximum-best-com... There was a particularly good benchmark comparison of the two which put them on a Pareto front of speed vs size from different levels over each on some different sources but I can't find that. ZSTD was ahead most of the time.

theandrewbailey 1y ago

7z has recently started supporting zstd compression, so you can compress much faster (though not as much).

zamadatix 1y ago
Which version added the ZSTD compression? I think decompression was 24.01
- theandrewbailey 1y ago
  I know that Peazip can compress 7z archives with zstd. https://peazip.github.io/ https://peazip.github.io/

mystified5016 1y ago

I can't recall the last time I saw a .rar in the wild. Probably would have been at the end of my teenage piracy years, between windows 7 and 8.