On Saturday, 21 May 2016 at 17:34:19 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
Equivalent to not mangling return type at all. But this leaves you with 2^^n growth, still exponential. Also is there any evidence that compression is faster than hashing?
Depends on implementation and algorithm. However even the weakest compression settings can yield huge initial compression benefits. In normal text a reduction of 2:1 is expected, and will . The benefit being compression still contains all it's information, and hashing will reduce the size to a fixed length but throw away all that information for unique identity.
LZO is a compressor/decompressor that prioritizes speed and can be used in real-time applications for very little cost to add compression to any application. I tinkered with some of it's options a while back and it did okay, not as good as zlib but that's to be expected. Although using zlib on it's fastest setting will likely yield good results too.
http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/
