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Comment by jwells89 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this will fix built-in decompressor’s lack of multithreading.

That’s actually why I’ve been installing 7-zip (which is multithreaded) on new Windows installs for the past several years: with the explosion of cores available in consumer hardware, the gulf in speed between single-threaded and multi-threaded is vast in this particular case.

With my Ryzen 5950X tower 7-zip will have ripped through an archive while the built-in decompressor is still plodding along. The difference while not quite as large is still significant on CPUs with fewer cores like the 5900X and 12700k.

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Oh, but that isn’t the problem. It’s that the old ZIP support issues 1-byte reads exclusively.

https://nitter.net/ericlaw/status/1399856554690715659

> [David Cutler] expressed his low opinion of the Unix process input/output model by reciting "Get a byte, get a byte, get a byte byte byte" to the tune of the finale of Rossini's William Tell Overture.

I don't see what that has anything to do with unix or stdio? The read/write syscalls will happily transfer much larger buffers. If an application invokes the syscalls directly with 1-byte chunks it's on the application. userspace IO buffering to amortize syscall costs exists in pretty much every language.

Cutler didn’t just lose once to Unix, he lost twice. First with VMS in minicomputers, and second with docker on cloud. Now Microsoft are turning windows into an ad infested mess, he’s about to go to loss #3

How can the "loss" be even be blamed on Cutler ? He doesn't choose his CEO

> That’s actually why I’ve been installing 7-zip

You had to before, right? Otherwise you’d simply not be able to decompress RAR, 7z, etc.

My usage of Windows since around 7 or so has consisted almost entirely of gaming, and with that use case it’s rare to encounter archives that aren’t regular old zip files.

On macOS though, one of the first things I always install is The Unarchiver which similarly decompresses just about anything and readily makes use of available CPU cores. The various archive tools that come with every Linux distro are usually capable enough that I don’t need to install anything extra.

I'm not entirely sure I understand at this point. Is the built-in Windows decompresser not sufficiently parallel for your needs?

I'm actually kinda surprised that even a single-threaded implementation isn't bottlenecked by I/O speed limits.

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