Talk:Snappy (compression)

Original authors

Hi,

As I am involved in the development of Snappy, editing this article would probably be a case of WP:COI, but the authors list is highly misleading. The original authors of Snappy (under the name of Zippy) are Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. I (Steinar H. Gunderson) did significant optimization work and almost all work related to open-sourcing, but I did not create the algorithm nor the format in the first place. Zeev Tarantov's role is very limited; he helped create a draft format specification, and tried to get a C port of Snappy into the Linux kernel (which, as far as I know, was never successful). In this light, having the authors list be “Zeev Tarantov, Steinar H. Gunderson” sounds wrong to me. -Sesse (talk) 18:17, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! Done (after it seems that Zeev took himself out).... ★NealMcB★ (talk) 18:01, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

Example of packed stream was generated by

this PD programme

#include <string>
#include <string.h>
#include <iostream>
#include "snappy.h"

using namespace std;

int main()
{
	char input[] = "Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 19 million articles (over 3.6 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.";
	string output;
	snappy::Compress(input, strlen(input), &output);
	cout << output;
	return 0;
}

You can compile this with "g++ 1.cpp -lsnappy -L." or change the text to shorter example. `a5b (talk) 22:52, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. The current explanation puzzles me in several places. First it notes that 0xf081 is a literal with length of 129+1 bytes, but that comes near the end, so the text encoded by those bytes is longer than the example shown. So thanks for your clarification here that the source example was longer than the quote shown now. We should indeed probably switch to a shorter quote, perhaps one with more early repetitions. Also, the varint explanation doesn't clarify how the "flag" is to be interpreted. If it is like protocol buffers, I'd expect the high-order byte to have a non-zero flag, but the first byte here (02) has a zero flag. So we should go for a better example with a clearer explanation. ★NealMcB★ (talk) 17:56, 26 September 2015 (UTC)