Re: cleaner/better zlib sources?

On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 09:11:49PM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:

Linus Torvalds wrote:

quoted

Now, it's possible that I'm just wrong, but the instruction-level profile 
really did pinpoint the "look up state branch pointer and jump to it" as 
some of the hottest part of that function. Which is just *evil*. You can 

ISTR there are a bunch of state transitions per byte, which would make 
sense that it shows up on profiles.

Yep, not surprising.

quoted

Now, I'm just wondering if anybody knows if there are better zlib 
implementations out there? This really looks like it could be a noticeable 
performance issue, but I'm lazy and would be much happier to hear that 
somebody has already played with optimizing zlib. Especially since I'm not 
100% sure it's really going to be noticeable..

I could have sworn that either Matt Mackall or Ben LaHaise had cleaned 
up the existing zlib so much that it was practically a new 
implementation.  I'm not aware of any open source implementations 
independent of zlib (except maybe that C++ behemoth, 7zip).

I cleaned up the version in lib/ that's used for boot on most systems.
It's quite a bit simpler and cleaner than the code lib/zlib (and
elsewhere!). But making it faster is another matter entirely - I don't
know off-hand how the two compare.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.