I hadn't heard of XZ embedded. Might be worth measuring it, but it would be competing with native gzip in the browser, which is hard to beat on speed. But maybe better compression would be worth it?

LZHAM is interesting in that area. Speed that competes with gzip and compression that competes with LZMA.

https://github.com/richgel999/lzham_codec

Interesting.

It reminds me encode.ru :)

Do you know the size of the compiled code?

In this discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8911369 someone quoted this page http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html as saying it compiles to about 150k. I can't find the current listing, but I'm on mobile :/

Btw: the author's blog talks about LZHAM quite a bit http://richg42.blogspot.com/

edit: Looks like it's up to 190k

                    Compression                      Compressed size      Decompresser  Total size   Time (ns/byte)
    Program           Options                       enwik8      enwik9     size (zip)   enwik9+prog  Comp Decomp  Mem Alg Note
    -------           -------                     ----------  -----------  -----------  -----------  ----- -----  --- --- ----
    lzham 1.0         -d29 -x                     25,002,070  202,237,199    191,600 s  202,428,799   1096   6.6 7800 LZ77 70
    xz 5.2.1--lzma2=preset=9e,dict=1GiB,lc=4,pb=0 24,703,772  197,331,816     36,752 xd 197,368,568   5876    20 6000 LZ77 73
    gzip 1.3.5        -9                          36,445,248  322,591,995     38,801 x  322,630,796    101    17  1.6 LZ77

Very cool! I appreciate the details :-)

I ran a quick with the tool (xzminidec) that comes with XZ Embedded.

    gcc -O3 -s -D XZ_USE_CRC64 -o xzminidec xzminidec.c xz_crc32.c xz_crc64.c xz_dec_stream.c xz_dec_lzma2.c 
    du -b xzminidec
     19472	xzminidec

    ldd xzminidec
     linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffe9905c000)
     libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007f105c83b000)
     /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x000055d818666000)

    du -b enwik8.zip 
     36445475	enwik8.zip

    du -b enwik8.xz 
     26375764	enwik8.xz

    time unzip enwik8.zip
     real	0m1.023s
     user	0m0.948s
     sys	0m0.068s

    time cat enwik8.xz | ./xzminidec > out-xz.txt
     real	0m2.598s
     user	0m2.504s
     sys	0m0.136s

    cmp enwik8 out-xz.txt 
     (empty)

unzip is faster but the xz decoder is very tiny and the compressed input file is smaller.

The most interesting feature (for me) is its small size:

"Compiled code is 8–20 KiB."

zlib is heavier (about 200Ko).

It could be used to make self-extractible asm.js programs or to compress some embedded resources (like files from "--embedd", fonts, images...).