News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Why are tar.xz files 15x smaller when using Python's tar compared to macOS tar?. Parent comment

Re:Why are tar.xz files 15x smaller when using Python's tar ... by 13of40 on Monday March 15, 2021 @12:01AM (#26462505)
I recall reading something in the 90s where in the 70s, Huffman coding was considered mathematically optimal compression and the whole field stagnated for a while because they thought they'd reached a fundamental limit.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why are tar.xz files 15x smaller when using Python's tar ... by kaba0 on Monday March 15, 2021 @09:57AM (#26466149)
“Huffman's original algorithm is optimal for a symbol-by-symbol coding with a known input probability distribution, i.e., separately encoding unrelated symbols in such a data stream” -wikipedia

So being pedantic, it is optimal in this specific meaning, but I don’t know about this stagnation.

[ Parent | on HN ]