Writing a Competitive Bzip2 Encoder in Ada From Scratch in a Few Days – Part 3
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
gautiersblog.blogspot.comTechstory
skepticalmixed
Debate
40/100
Bzip2AdaCompression Algorithms
Key topics
Bzip2
Ada
Compression Algorithms
See also Part 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44555924, Part 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44889163
The author shares their experience writing a competitive BZip2 encoder in Ada from scratch, but the discussion is marred by complaints about ads and skepticism about the relevance of Ada to the project.
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3 months ago
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I’ll read it when I get back to my home network with my pihole. Websites like this remind me why I block all ads.
I get basically no ads on any website on iOS.
But, still, these are treatises on the BZip2 algorithm. These posts have pretty much nothing to do with Ada.
No "how would one approach this with Ada", "here's the naive simple Ada", "here's how I made it faster with more clever Ada", "see, Ada, can write fast code too".
Anything like that, but there's nothing there.
There's links to code, but I just felt that with the title, that this would be about Ada implementing BZip2, not about BZip2 and, "oh, here's some source that just happens to be Ada".
Precisely, there is no such a thing as the BZip2 algorithm: there are multiple ways of programming it, and more importantly, there is a near infinity of possible encodings of the same inputs in the BZip2 format. The compression ratio depends on the choices made in that area. That point is addressed in part 3.