[082349872349872]

TIL. IIUC, LZ4 doesn't care about the compression ratio (to which you are correct I had been alluding) but does strongly care about guaranteeing a block maximum size. (so still the same kind of concern, just on an absolute and not a relative basis)

[Dylan16807]

Just simplify it further. Get rid of the implicit +4 to the match size. 0-15 instead of 4-19. Now you can guarantee any block size you want.

If you wanted to go even simpler, here's an entire compression format described in one line:

one byte literal length, one byte match length, two bytes match offset, 0-255 literal bytes, repeat