Metacompression

This morning, I had fun compressing time.

But before you picture me as a theoretical physics genius or a crackpot in need of a straitjacket, let me explain.

I am currently working on Metarc, a metacompression tool (understand: applying smart transformations to certain structures before handing off to a classical compressor like zstd). If you have never heard the term, you will understand in 5 minutes. If you are a compression expert, hang on, you might find food for debate.

What if the real gain wasn’t at the byte level?

I have always been fascinated by compression algorithms — I was 15 when I “invented” Run Length Encoding (before learning it had been discovered more than 20 years before I was born).
I marveled at the visual simplicity of Huffman coding, and at the cleverness of Lempel-Ziv which dynamically builds its dictionary.

These algorithms are powerful, and it is no coincidence that they are continuously improved and combined to produce increasingly more powerful algorithms: Brotli, zstd.