LZO

LZO is a run-time compression C library that is also available in a Java implementation that offers fairly moderate compression in return for high compression and decompression speeds. Intended to be used for internal data compression in databases and similar applications rather than file compression, but in those sort of cases a low load decompression can in addition to saving space actually speed up reading and writing to and from slow peripherals such as hard drives.

The LZO C library appears to compile fairly cleanly on OS/2 with the usual caveats about compiler and system differences and so on, and in fact was commonly used in a number of open source projects. However because the code is licensed under the GPL and can therefore only be used in other GPL projects and the emergence of the Snappy and LZ4 packages that offer similar amount of compression and compression speeds, coupled with much faster decompression speeds from the latter packages, its use has all but disappeared, even in GPL'd projects that used to use it internally. And for those same reason you are not recommended to use LZO unless you need to support legacy software that uses it.

Version

 * 2.0.9 (2015-02-04)
 * 2.10 (2017-03-17)

Links

 * LZO homepage
 * Reimplementation in Java]


 * A comparison of Java implementations of LZO, Snappy, LZ4 and zLib - Differences apparently not as great as with the original C/C++ implementations