https://blog.assad.fr/en/tags/metarc/Recent content in Metarc on Arhuman's BlogHugoen-usSat, 16 May 2026 01:38:37 +0100https://blog.assad.fr/en/post/time_compression/Sat, 16 May 2026 01:38:37 +0100https://blog.assad.fr/en/post/time_compression/<p>This morning, I had fun compressing time.</p> <p>But before you picture me as a theoretical physics genius or a crackpot in need of a straitjacket, let me explain.</p> <p>I am currently working on <a href="https://github.com/arhuman/metarc-go">Metarc</a>, a <em>metacompression</em> tool (understand: applying smart transformations to certain structures before handing off to a classical compressor like <code>zstd</code>). If you have never heard the term, you will understand in 5 minutes. If you are a compression expert, hang on, you might find food for debate.</p>https://blog.assad.fr/en/post/what_is_metacompression/Fri, 24 Apr 2026 02:38:37 +0100https://blog.assad.fr/en/post/what_is_metacompression/<h2 id="what-if-the-real-gain-wasnt-at-the-byte-level">What if the real gain wasn&rsquo;t at the byte level?</h2> <p>I have always been fascinated by compression algorithms — I was 15 when I &ldquo;invented&rdquo; Run Length Encoding (before learning it had been discovered more than 20 years before I was born).<br> I marveled at the visual simplicity of Huffman coding, and at the cleverness of Lempel-Ziv which dynamically builds its dictionary.</p> <p>These algorithms are powerful, and it is no coincidence that they are continuously improved and combined to produce increasingly more powerful algorithms: <code>Brotli</code>, <code>zstd</code>.</p>