I love it. So much in computers is trade offs and this was a fun read exploring it.

It would be interesting to see some economics of what 8,000% increase in encoding time takes to make that money back in terms of storage or bandwidth. I also wonder how brotli/lzma would compare here. Are there some obscene modes on those that had similar results?

I also wonder how brotli/lzma would compare here.

Far better, just like anything else based on arithmetic coding. The main distinction here is that the output can still be decompressed with a standard Inflate implementation.

zstd has higher level modes. Default is -3. I saw a good tradeoff between compression speed and ratio up to -9 or so. From -20 to -22 it will use much more memory and IIRC can have downstream effects on decompression speed. I'm using -9 for my container registry and plan to recompress at a higher level for commonly accessed base layers, as well as give customers a button that lets them pay a bit more to do it themselves.

Process-intensive, but higher compression has clear strategic value. Distant satellites such as Voyager, where bandwidth is severely limited, could transmit more data using such capabilities. Equally, for long-term archival storage, improved compression would allow far greater volumes of data to be preserved on durable, life-long media formats.

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