Hey everyone, if you're looking for a more approachable guide on bitmap compression, I wrote a blog post on it this year: https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/roaring-bitmaps.html. It covers run-length encoding, BBC, WAH, Concise, and even Roaring Bitmaps.
That’s a good read, thanks! The history is interesting, but in practice, I’m wondering if there’s any reason not to skip it and just learn about roaring bitmaps?
Absolutely! For inspiration on how roaring bitmaps can be used in practice, check out https://roaringbitmap.org/. The blog post is part of a book I am writing on obscure data structures (https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/dsa-book.html), so explaining the history was a way to dive into the evolution of this topic and the limitations of each implementation, in order to motivate a SOTA.