Hacker News Reader

Put that 64kb exe file into a zip file, and it becomes 62 kilobytes...

Clearly there was a little more space they could have eeked out!

Just enough space to fit some zip-decompression code? (I have no idea how much space that would actually take tbh)

Yeah I think that’s the reason it didn’t happen ;) not saying it’s impossible to make in less than 2kb, but it would have to be around 1kb to make it really worthwhile, so they could squeeze in more content.

They already have a compressor/packer - so this 2kb represents space 'left on the table' by that packer (either due to the algorithm being bad, or the packer's decompressor being big).

Considering ZIP normally uses deflate, which is LZ77 + huffman. LZ77 is super simple and can be implemented in ~30 bytes of code. Huffman tables are fairly simple, but I can't easily visualize some assembly instructions to implement them, however arithmetic coding in all cases exceeds huffman's performance, and can be implemented in about 60 bytes of code. Total = 90 bytes to save 2 kilobytes. Seems worth it.

Note that both these decompressors will be awfully slow, but for just 64 kilobytes of input data I don't think that'll be an issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com