misa77
a codec that decodes 2x faster than LZ4 (at better ratios)
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I've spent the last few months working on this codec.It has the following characteristics: - SOTA decompression throughput in its ratio class - Decent ratios (comparable to LZ4 at high effort levels) - Slow compression Most of the gains can be attributed to reducing branches and making decompression very friendly to out-of-order cores, by using a smart format.Results on the tarred Silesia corpus on Intel x86-64 follow: codec decode ratio encode misa77 -0 5219 MB/s 42.64% 54.5 MB/s misa77 -1 4274 MB/s 39.65% 51.2 MB/s lz4 2505 MB/s 47.59% 371 MB/s lz4hc -12 2531 MB/s 36.45% 7.31 MB/s
HN · launched Jul 15, 2026 · 164 upvotes (top 5%) · 0 views
Niche: file and data compression tools · 100 launches, 15 in the last 7 days ▲ +88% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Data infrastructure
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 100 launches in file and data compression tools →
Could you build this?
No Creating a lossless data compression codec that outperforms LZ4 requires deep expertise in low-level CPU architecture, instruction-level parallelism, branchless programming, and information theory.
What it would actually take: Building this requires expert knowledge of C/Rust, x86/ARM assembly, SIMD vectorization, and CPU cache hierarchies. The engineering involves designing custom bitstream token formats, prefix coding, and branchless byte-copy loops that saturate memory bandwidth while maintaining optimal compression ratios.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Zstd, Selkie, LZ4, LZO1X, Oodle
Concerns raised: Compression speed needs vast improvement, lacks arch-specific implementations, Compressed stream format may continue to change, affecting stability, Cannot be used for untrusted inputs without safety guarantees, Prevents streaming due to separate stream design
Feature requests: Add arch-specific optimizations for compression performance, Support in Parquet format, Improved compression ratio option for Snappy-like use cases
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 81 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #2 of 82 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 256 days after the earliest competitor.
- ZXC · hn · 2025-12-17 · 28 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Glyd · github · 2026-09-19 · 164 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- TurboBench, the Compression Lie Detector, 100 Codecs, Daily Update · hn · 2026-09-16 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Overfitted a 900KB Transformer to Compress a 100MB CSV into 7MB · hn · 2026-06-23 · 112 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Ultima7_Decomp · github · 2026-09-30 · 59 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Smaller than WinRaR but 4x faster · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- ExANS · hn · 2026-08-05 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- go-binsync · hn · 2026-08-27 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.39
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