A nice overview of #lossless #compression #algorithms with a brief #history:

“History Of Lossless Data Compression Algorithms” [2014], ETHW (https://ethw.org/History_of_Lossless_Data_Compression_Algorithms).

Via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31922396

#LZ77 #LempelZiv #LosslessCompression #ZIP #DEFLATE #LZMA #HuffmanCoding #RLE

I'm going to try to do a better of explaining #HuffmanCoding in a toot 'cause holy heck is the Wikipedia article bad about explaining what it is:

ASCII uses one byte for every character. That's wasteful if some characters are much more common than others! So use fewer bits for the common characters and more bits for the less common characters, thereby using fewer bits overall.

In order to tell characters apart in the bitstream, make sure no two characters begin with the same bit pattern.