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Does deflate lead the pack in any metric at all anymore? Only one I can think of is extreme low spec compression (microcontrollers).


The only metric deflate leads on is widespread support. By any other metric, it has been superseded.


I'd assume memory usage as well, because it has a tiny context window compared to zstd


You can change the context window of zstd if you want. But yes, the default context window size for zstd is 8MB, versus 32k.


Even there, LZ4 is probably better.


You think LZ4 is more portable than zlib? I'm gonna need some citations on that.

zlib is 30 years old, according to Wikipedia. And that's technically wrong since 'zlib' was factored out of gzip (nearly 33 years old) for use in libpng, which is also 30 years old.


A basic LZ4 decompressor is on the order of a few dozen lines of code. It's exceptionally easy to implement.


Just because its old doesn't mean it's more portable. If anything it makes me think it's even less portable.


not more portable, but probably faster in resource constrained environments




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