It's fantastic to see so much fascinating work in compression these days after a fair amount of stagnation. I know there had been a lot of specialized but codec work but the recent discoveries are very much for wide use.

You now have LZ4, Brotil, zstd, snappy, lzfse, lzma all pretty useful practical codec.

Brotil is interesting though. It can be an easy replacement for zlib at level 1 with fairly higher compression then zlib at similar speed.

On the other hand with with lzma it can handily beat lzma but with an even slower compression rate (from the levels that they published in the benchmark) but on the other hand with much higher decompression speed meaning its very good for distribution work. It would be interesting to see the compression ratio, time for levels between 1-9.

It's actually a much easier replacement for zlib then lzma for some. The benchmark shows only level 1,9 and 11. It seems that it can handily beat lzma but at the cost of compression speed (I wonder who use more memory). Then again its decompression speed is so much better making it a perfect choice for distribution.

What truly surprise me though is the work of 'Yann Collet'. A single person so handily beating google's snappy. Even his zstd work looks ground breaking. When I read couple of weeks ago that he was a part time hobby programmer I just didn't know how to be suitably impressed.

Am I reading right that apples lzfse is based of a mix of lz+zstd?