Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Is there more information about Google Snappy?

I see that Google have released their internal compression library, Snappy, as open source.

Unfortunately, besides the code itself, there doesn't appear to be a lot of additional information about the library. The README is clear and well written, but not tremendously detailed.

The README, and the project's home page, basically say: "read the code".

Which is fine, of course!

But I was hoping to find some design documents or other discussions about why one might choose to use or not use this library, how and when to use it, how to inter-operate (or not) with other compression schemes, etc.

Google seem to have a lot of interesting libraries that fall into states like these: the Google collection classes, the Google enhanced networking code, all the fancy Google web tools. It's amazing stuff, but it's kind of hard to deal with when it just arrives on the scene, without a lot of the backstory included.

1 comment:

  1. Hi,

    I posted some information that might be relevant to the questions you ask in my personal blog when we launched: http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2011-03-22-19-24_snappy .

    There's also a mailing list; feel free to ask questions on it if there's anything. :-)

    /* Steinar */

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