News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Building a data compression utility in Haskell using Huffman codes. Parent comment

Re:Building a data compression utility in Haskell using Huff... by lazamar on Thursday July 04, 2024 @04:35AM (#40873342)
There is one way in which Huffman codes are better: they are easier to explain and simpler to implement.

I went for simplicity of exposition in the post, but arithmetic coders can indeed get arbitrarily close to the entropy, which is not quite the case with Huffman.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Building a data compression utility in Haskell using Huff... by nottorp on Thursday July 04, 2024 @06:13AM (#40873732)
> easier to explain

I think Huffman is the one compression algorithm that compresses stuff significantly that can fit on the proverbial napkin, so it's a good start.

The others require the whole napkin stack at the table.

[ Parent | on HN ]