Snappy

Snappy is a compression/decompression C++ class library. It offers fairly moderate compression in return for high compression speeds and in particular excellent 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.

Bindings
The software comes with C bindings, but there also exists an unofficial port to C.

The Snappy C++ class and the C bindings and port appear to compile fairly cleanly on OS/2 with the usual caveats about compiler and system differences and so on, however when it comes to foreign language bindings and ports you may for some of them need to do some additional work since some of the common Windows and Unix like implementations differ quite a bit from the OS/2 ones and a number of the current OS/2 implementations are getting quite old, the Java ports run like a charm though. In fact the library is written entirely in C++ with no in-line assembly and generic enough to be easily portable to most systems, although on single tasking systems like DOS they make little sense unless you are using something like TopSpeed C++ that can actually create DOS threads.

Other programming languages
Bindings are available for amongst others: Ports/re-implementations:
 * Node.js (may be usable with other ECMAScript implementations as well),
 * Haskell, Java, Common Lisp, Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Smalltalk.
 * Java, Common Lisp, C

Links

 * Snappy by google
 * Snappy repository on GitHub


 * Ports
 * C port by Andi Kleen
 * Common Lisp port by Robert Brown


 * Re-implementations
 * Jsnappy - A pure Java re-implementation of Snappy.
 * Snappy in Java by Dain Sundstrom - Another Java re-implementation, supposedly faster than Jsnappy.


 * Bindings
 * Squak Smalltalk bindings
 * JNI bindings for LZ4 and Snappy]

Publications

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

License and status

 * Open source software made available under the Three Clause BSD License - Active development.

Authors & publisher

 * Google
 * Andi Kleen (C port)
 * Robert Brown (LISP port)
 * Dain Sundstrom (Snappy in Java)
 * Masashi Umezawa (Squak port)
 * Binglin Chang (Java/JNI bindings)