[ANN] first release of lz4-chans

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Dear OCamlers,

It is my pleasure to announce the first release of lz4_chans:

You can use them as drop-in replacement for the channels provided
by the stdlib:

(** open/close binary channels, with LZ4-compression
    happening in the background, using a separate process and a named pipes *)

val open_in_bin: string -> in_channel
val open_out_bin: string -> out_channel

val close_in: in_channel -> unit
val close_out: out_channel -> unit

val with_in_file: string -> (in_channel -> 'a) -> 'a
val with_out_file: string -> (out_channel -> 'a) -> 'a

It was fun to write this little system programming thing.

Performance tests on my computer:

2019-05-17 16:38:40.483 INFO : plain_fn: /tmp/lz4_chans_test_1b1d6a.bin
2019-05-17 16:38:41.847 INFO : plain output: 7335450.09 floats/s
2019-05-17 16:38:42.670 INFO : plain input: 12191301.78 floats/s
2019-05-17 16:38:42.686 INFO : lz4_fn: /tmp/lz4_chans_test_8b6517.bin.lz4
2019-05-17 16:38:45.348 INFO : lz4 output: 3757097.68 floats/s; eficiency: 0.51
2019-05-17 16:38:46.518 INFO : lz4 input: 8557598.32 floats/s; efficiency: 0.70

Regards,
F.

1 Like
2

Would be awesome at some point to use decompress library in the future, if and when LZ4 will be implemented there.

3

Contributions are welcome.

But, the fun thing with the pipe hack and using a system command is that you
can easily change to whatever real-time compressor is available on your system.

You just need to change the (de)compression commands, run the test (make test) and you are good to go! :smile: