[phrh8]

How does DivANS compare to state of the art compression algorithms? Is Brotli widely acknowledged as the state of the art or you just compare to it because it is fast?

My understanding is Zstd was designed to be fast, not necessarily efficient, and the other algorithms listed (e.g. 7-zip, gzip) are quite ancient.

[daniel_rh]

Blog co-author here: With the settings in the blog post, the DivANS algorithm skews towards saving space over speed. Brotli skews heavily towards decompression speed without sacrificing much ratio. The reason we focus a lot on comparing to Brotli, is that Brotli does extremely well on data stored at Dropbox.

However, I don't think the performance is a fundamental law, and there are clearly some clever optimizations yet-to-be done.

I was very surprised that the lzma-brotli mashup outperformed either. This leads me to think that with enough community involvement we could discover some really clever heuristics and algorithms for compression all together.