Remix clone Hacker News

How come they don't (just) apply zlib on DER? Is telco equipment able to stream process UPER without buffering more than non-constructed values?

▲

userbinator a day ago | parent | next [-]

When every bit passing through the network gets charged (if not to the customer, then it's taking up capacity that could otherwise be charged to the customer), and the software in the endpoints needs to be as low-power as possible, zlib is additional overhead you definitely don't want.

▲

eqvinox a day ago | parent | prev [-]

PER were defined in 1994; back then applying zlib wasn't something you "just" do. Modern use is backwards compatibility (or cargo cult.)

	▲	nicce a day ago \| parent [-]
		UPER is extremely compact encoding format. It still makes sense to use UPER, because after all, it is an international standard and telecommunication protocols itself are supposed to add as little overhead on top of actual payload as possible. For example, if you have ASN.1 UTF-8 string that is constrained to 52 specific characters - UPER encoding can present every character with 6 bits (not bytes). In modern world you can apply zlib on top of UPER encoding or internal payload, however, depending on the use case.