/opt/zig-0.12/zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast

Resulting executable is in zig-out/bin/srz

For the sake of simplicity, srz can only read from stdin (if it is not a tty) and can only write to stdout (if it is also not a tty). So, just use redirections and pipe-lining, like this:

A. srz c < file > file.srz
B. a-prog | srz c > file.srz

srz d < file.srz > file

  == enwik9 (1_000_000_000 bytes) ==

          cs, MB      ct, s   eff   opt
 gzip : 323.742882   31.707  0.779
 zstd : 278.180840   36.352  0.791  -10
  sr2 : 273.906319   32.156  0.908
 srz4 : 261.112120   28.895  1.060  // L1 ctx = ((ctx << 6) + s) & 0x00ffffff;
bzip2 : 253.977891   64.173  0.491
 srz4 : 246.719886   44.265  0.733  // L1 ctx = ((ctx << 5) + s) & 0x00ffffff;
 zstd : 242.303796  375.695  0.088  -19
  srx : 236.319404   23.931  1.415
   xz : 230.153052  427.564  0.081

 cs = compressed-size
 ct = compression-time
eff = (1_000_000_000 ^ 2) / (125 * cs * ct)
eff stands for 'efficiency'.

srz has two levels (stages) of encoding/decoding:

• LEVEL 1: symbol ranking codec (SR)
• LEVEL 2: arithmetic/range codec (AC)

SR uses 3 byte context (hash of 4 most recently seen bytes). For each context value SR maintains 4 byte list of symbols. Symbols in these lists are kept ordered by recency using savage MTF. Position of a symbol in a list is it's rank (1,2,3,4). Symbols that were not in a list are encoded as is (literals). Ranks are encoded with unary codes, like this:

     '1' : rank 1
    '01' : literal follows
   '001' : rank 2
  '0001' : rank 3
 '00001' : rank 4
'000001' : EOF marker

Such a choice of the codes is based on the observations that (usually) the number of 1-st place matches is greater than the number of mismatches and the latter is greater than any other.

Bit stream from SR is processed by arithmetic codec (borrowed from fpaq0p). AC uses 26 bit context which includes:

• leading 1, 1 bit (models position of bit in a codeword)
• first-place life-time counter, 4 bits (0..15)
• rank of the most recent symbol, 3 bits (0..4)
• most recent symbol itself, 8 bits
• already processed bits of unary code (and possible literal)

• enwik9 benchmark
• srank (C) by P.M.Fenwick, 1996
• sr2 (C++) by M.Mahoney, 2007
• srx (Rust) by Mai Thanh Minh, 2023
• MTF
• Unary coding