Re: C++ Deflate (zlib-like) library

From: Vinnie Falco (vinnie.falco_at_[hidden])
Date: 2020-03-11 01:17:58

On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 5:03 PM Jeff Garland <azswdude_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> fyi w.r.t streaming there is already a proposal in this area -- which I thought got put into the library fundamentals TS, but not seeing that it happened now.  There is a github for it, but I think Peter got tired of championing this and would like others to pick it up.

"streambuf" is far too heavyweight to use as a low-level interface. I
already pointed out that a codec needs to have as arguments not only
the input and output "spans" but also return the number of bytes
transacted for input and output.

signal-to-noise in this discussion is low...in a sense, zlib gets the
crux of it right with the z_params:

    struct z_params
    {
       void const* next_in;
       std::size_t avail_in;
       std::size_t total_in = 0;
       void* next_out;
       std::size_t avail_out;
       std::size_t total_out = 0;
       int data_type = unknown;  // best guess about the data type:
binary or text
    };

The question is, can we do better than this? I'm certain that all
answers which boil down to "copy std stream APIs" are wrong.

Thanks