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Comment by livrem | Hacker News Reader

I liked that the article begins with the Hoare quote "One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies" that was also the exact first thing I thought about when reading about the mess with the backdoor yesterday.

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That's irrelevant to the file formats themselves, however. A simple file format doesn't automatically guarantee a simple implementation, especially for compression algorithms.

> That's irrelevant to the file formats themselves, however. A simple file format doesn't automatically guarantee a simple implementation,

Maybe it doesn't guarantee it, but at least a simple format makes it possible.

A complex format makes it impossible to have a simply implementation.

But both the lzip and xz file format is much simpler than the actual meat, the compressed stream format. I agree that xz has lots of redundant and useless bits, but it is still simple enough to summarize in a single comment [1]. Lzip looks simple, but it actually uses a variant of LZMA stream format so it is not simpler to implement than xz since you can't even use a stock LZMA library.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39873112

only in indirect way - simpler format could allow to find another real maintainer *or even continue to maintain it himself), because it has less features.

but I think xz won the linux-lzma-archive formats war exactly because it was more complex than lzip, e.g. by supporting more versatile lzma2 format, which allowed to implement multi-threaded compression and decompression (pretty sophisticated things), and better crc64/sha256 hash checking

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