Facebook has developed promising asymmetric compression technology and aspires to share it with the world.
Dubbed “Superpack” and detailed in a post by Facebook Engineering software engineer Sapan Bhatia, the tech “combines compiler analysis with data compression to uncover size optimizations beyond the capability of traditional compression tools”.
Bhatia explains that Facebook needs compression because its apps keep bloating, but users don’t want bigger apps. Algorithmic options such as Deflate and LZMA can certainly do a job, but Bhatia said they “work well with monolithic data” but “weren’t enough to offset the pace of growth we were seeing in our apps”.
So Facebook did its own thing.
“Superpack is based on an insight in Kolmogorov’s algorithmic measure of…
