Zstandard: Modern Compression Algorithm
Zstandard (zstd) emerged from Facebook in 2016, created by Yann Collet—the same engineer behind LZ4. The motivation was straightforward: existing compression algorithms forced an uncomfortable…
Read more →Compression
Union-Find with Path Compression and Union by Rank
Union-Find, also known as Disjoint Set Union (DSU), is a data structure that tracks a collection of non-overlapping sets. It supports two primary operations: finding which set an element belongs to,…
Read more →Run-Length Encoding: Simple Compression
Run-length encoding is one of the simplest compression algorithms you’ll encounter. The concept is straightforward: instead of storing repeated consecutive elements individually, you store a count…
Read more →LZ77 and LZ78: Dictionary-Based Compression
Statistical compression methods like Huffman coding and arithmetic coding work by assigning shorter codes to more frequent symbols. They’re elegant, but they miss something obvious: real-world data…
Read more →Huffman Coding: Prefix-Free Compression
Every byte you transmit or store costs something. Compression reduces that cost by exploiting redundancy in data. Lossless compression—where the original data is perfectly recoverable—relies on a…
Read more →Data Compression: Algorithms and Trade-offs
Data compression reduces storage costs, speeds up network transfers, and can even improve application performance by reducing I/O bottlenecks. Every time you load a webpage, stream a video, or…
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