[nathell]

Kamila Szewczyk is working on a bzip3 to improve the state-of-the-art in the domain of compressors based on Burrows-Wheeler:

https://github.com/kspalaiologos/bzip3

I’m keeping fingers crossed for the project. Especially given that the author is 19 and her best work is yet to come.

[adrian_b]

When I have first heard about bzip3, a few months ago, I have run a series of tests, comparing it with zstd and other compression programs.

In the beginning, I had been extremely impressed, because with the test archives that I happened to use bzip3 had outperformed zstd in all cases, at all possible settings for both, either in compression time at the same compressed size, or in the compressed size at the same compression time.

Nevertheless, later my initial enthusiasm had to be tempered, because I have found other test archives where the compression ratio achieved by bzip3 was more modest, falling behind other compression programs.

Therefore, the performance of bzip3 seems a little hard to predict, at least for now, but there are circumstances when it has excellent performance, with a much better compromise between compression speed and compressed size than the current alternatives.