Looking for a small portable compression library done in c/c++. Check out
mini-lzo . Props to Markus F.X.J. Oberhumer for this contribution. The compression isn't as good as zlib, but it is small, lightweight and fast.
I'll be a monkey's uncle
I typed this entry up after midnight on the 24th. Today, I'm browsing the new mags at my local Border's and I picked up a copy of the latest Linux Journal. Lo and behold, it contains an article, "Compression Tools Compared", discussing the various compression packages out there - both in terms of speed and size reduction. The author Kingsley G. Morse Jr. confirms that lzop is the fastest - both for compression and decompression. The article is linux centric, so he doesn't cover portability when discussing library support.
The main reason I'm considering lzop (besides its speed and lightweight memory footprint) is its portability. It (apparently) compiles on many platforms with various compiler support. Zlib compiles on windows, but apparently only under cygwin.... which is not an option. The author did point out a couple of other libraries capable of gzipping. They include zlib, zlibc, zlib1g, and zziplib. I haven't checked all of these out - but I will. Finally, there is the lzma library for doing 7zip compression. I checked this out last night, I couldn't tell if it had cross-platform support or not.
