[beagle3]

LZ4 deserves a lot of respect, but it is merely a recent improvement on a very old idea.

It wasn't novel when Lempel and Ziv described it 1977 - the encoding idea itself is almost trivial, and was described before. However, they did prove the conditions under which this compression is asymptotically optimal, which was NOT at all clear or trivial at the time - and it is therefore named after them.

LZ4 is an implementation of the LZ77 idea that optimized run time first and compression ratio second. It is elegant and successful - but it has little novelty.