New Generation Entropy coders

This library proposes two high speed entropy coders :

Huff0, a Huffman codec designed for modern CPU, featuring OoO (Out of Order) operations on multiple ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit), achieving extremely fast compression and decompression speeds.

FSE is a new kind of Entropy encoder, based on ANS theory, from Jarek Duda, achieving precise compression accuracy (like Arithmetic coding) at much higher speeds.

Branch	Status
master
dev

Benchmarks

Benchmarks are run on an Intel Core i7-5600U, with Linux Mint 64-bits. Source code is compiled using GCC 4.8.4, 64-bits mode. Test files are generated using the provided probagen program. Benchmark breaks sample files into blocks of 32 KB. Huff0 and FSE are compared to zlibh, the huffman encoder within zlib, provided by Frederic Kayser.

By design, Huffman can't break the "1 bit per symbol" limit, hence loses efficiency on squeezed distributions, such as Proba80. FSE is free of such limit, and its compression efficiency remains close to Shannon limit in all circumstances. However, this accuracy is not always necessary, and less compressible distributions show little difference with Huffman. On its side, Huff0 delivers in the form of a massive speed advantage.

Branch Policy

External contributions are welcomed and encouraged. The "master" branch is only meant to host stable releases. The "dev" branch is the one where all contributions are merged. If you want to propose a patch, please commit into "dev" branch or dedicated feature branch. Direct commit to "master" are not permitted.