[arp242]

  % gcc xmas.c
  xmas.c:2:1: warning: return type defaults to 'int' [-Wimplicit-int]
      2 | main(t,_,a)
        | ^~~~
  xmas.c: In function 'main':
  xmas.c:2:1: warning: type of 't' defaults to 'int' [-Wimplicit-int]
  xmas.c:2:1: warning: type of '_' defaults to 'int' [-Wimplicit-int]


  % wc -c <xmas.c
  913
  % ./a.out | wc -c
  2359
  % ./a.out | compress | wc -c
  1048

[jrockway]

zstd -19 compresses the text of the song to 309 bytes.

To be a fair comparison, though, you'd have to write zstd -d in 604 bytes. I suppose to be REALLY fair, though, you have to count the bytes of code in the compiler itself. A convenient enough implementation of compression could index into the C compiler binary to find the bytes it needs. (For example, my GCC contains "first", "second", and "third" in the binary, which a sufficiently clever implementation could make use of. "Exit on the first error occurred.", "Append a second underscore if the name already contains an underscore.", "Warn about suspicious calls to memset where the third argument is constant literal zero and the second is not.", etc. I didn't check but I doubt turtle doves or maids-a-milking come up that often in the description of warning flags.)

[arp242]

zstd didn't exist in 1988.

[jrockway]

This article was posted to HN today, in 2023!

[arp242]

And that comment was clearly written in 1988. I fail to see what's so hard to understand about that and why people feel the need to "prove" it's "wrong".

[jrockway]

I don't think people are trying to prove it's wrong. Most of the comments are saying that general purpose technology in 2023 doesn't reduce the file size by as much as the manual job in 1988 did.