I'm all for a replacement for BAM file format and the quality scores. Ideally something that supports delta based encoding to a reference genome similar to CRAM

I'm all for a replacement for BAM file format and the quality scores. Ideally something that supports delta based encoding to a reference genome similar to CRAM and something that more compactly represents quality of bases sequenced. In the meantime as a user of BAM I'm very very very grateful for faster zlib as it makes life a lot better with the current large installed base of programs that use BAM and data sets in BAM. These sort of improvements really do make a meaningful difference in the same way that switching to SSDs from magnetic disks didn't improve the implementation of my software but makes my computer a lot faster to boot up and compile things.