HOW TO RUN
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Make sure cmake and make are installed, then run:
./test.sh
This will also run some predefined tests. To run the test on a specific file, run:
./test.sh file
FEATURES
--------
- The class 'CompressedByteArray' encapsulates the compressed sequence. It allows
constant time random access using the overloaded indexing operator. This design
allows the sequence to be accessed like normal arrays.
- The number of bits needed per symbol is chosen dynamically instead of hardcoded,
allowing arbitrary files and also providing better compression for files with few
unique symbols.
LIMITATIONS
-----------
- The algorithm is not on-the-fly, it needs to scan the whole file first in order
to find the lowest number of bits that can represent every symbol.
- The number of bits per symbol is fixed, not adaptive. A few infrequent symbols
can make the compressed file much bigger.
- Slow speed on large files, because of inefficient bit-by-bit processing.
- mmap could have been used to avoid loading the whole file in memory.
- Ad-hoc testing system.
