On Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:56:02 +0300 Peter Volkov <p...@gentoo.org> wrote: > В Птн, 19/12/2008 в 14:45 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh пишет: > > If it reads (and presumably uncompresses) all of them at startup > > anyway, what's the point in compressing them at all? > > It makes size smaller: both index and data files are text files so > compression is very effective. All distributions I've checked compress > data files, some compress both data and index. Probably all desktop > users want dictionaries to be compressed because modern cpu's are > really fast in decompression and even on my 4-years old notebook it > takes less then second... But still there are environments where it's > better to keep dictionaries uncompressed. That's why I want to keep > this feature optional.
But disk space is cheap. How big are the dictionaries? The vim dictionaries are around half a meg uncompressed, and if you're looking to save a meg or two in disk space on the kind of system that includes dictionaries then you're doing something seriously wrong... Really, all that compression seems to do is save a small amount of irrelevant disk space, at the cost of requiring more disk space and memory for a new library and slowing things down to a level that's unacceptable on some systems. Compression makes sense for network transfers, backups and file formats that do their own domain specific compression. Elsewhere? Likely not so much. -- Ciaran McCreesh
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