While the final result is still, technically, a frame,
the resulting frame expands initial data instead of compressing it.
This is because the streaming API creates a tiny 1-byte buffer for input,
because it believes input is empty (0-bytes),
because in the past, 0 used to mean "unknown" instead.
This patch fixes the issue.
Todo : add a test which traps the issue.
The new macro might be a bit too restrictive.
Systems which do not support new test will simply default to <time.h>'s `clock_t clock()`,
suffering lesser benchmark accuracy.
Should it matter, the detection macro will have to be upgraded.
last such side-effect was modifying cctx->loadedDictEnd on setting forceWindow.
It is no a useless operation, so it's removed.
No side-effect left when setting a compression parameter.
-ftrapv is apparently buggy for gcc.
versions >= 5 are supposed to work better,
but even then, some complaints say it's still flaky when optimizations are enabled.
I even saw a post saying it only works if one creates its own signal handler,
which would make this flag no longer transparent.
on clang, it seems to work correctly.
But we would need to add a method to selectively add flags depending on compiler.
That's too much troubles for the intended benefit
(just catch integer overflows, which we can also do using ubsan).
Any ZSTD_CCtx_setParameter() shall just write the requested parameter, without further action.
Any action shall be taken at parameter application only (during init).
It makes it possible to just copy CCtxParams from external container to internal state,
and get rid of the more complex code which was trying to compensate for missing actions.
There was a flaw in the formula
which compared literal cost with match cost :
at a given position,
a non-null literal suite is going to be part of next sequence,
while if position ends a previous match, to immediately start another match,
next sequence will have a litlength of zero.
A litlength of zero has a non-null cost.
It follows that literals cost should be compared to match cost + litlength==0.
Not doing so gave a structural advantage to matches, which would be selected more often.
I believe that's what led to the creation of the strange heuristic which added a complex cost to matches.
The heuristic was actually compensating.
It was probably created through multiple trials, settling for best outcome on a given scenario (I suspect silesia.tar).
The problem with this heuristic is that it's hard to understand,
and unfortunately, any future change in the parser would impact the way it should be calculated and its effects.
The "proper" formula makes it possible to remove this heuristic.
Now, the problem is : in a head to head comparison, it's sometimes better, sometimes worse.
Note that all differences are small (< 0.01 ratio).
In general, the newer formula is better for smaller files (for example, calgary.tar and enwik7).
I suspect that's because starting statistics are pretty poor (another area of improvement).
However, for silesia.tar specifically, it's worse at level 22 (while being better at level 17, so even compression level has an impact ...).
It's a pity that zstd -22 gets worse on silesia.tar.
That being said, I like that the new code gets rid of strange variables,
which were introducing complexity for any future evolution (faster variants being in mind).
Therefore, in spite of this detrimental side effect, I tend to be in favor of it.
optState was used both to evaluate price
and to cache cost of previously calculated literals.
This created a strong dependency, forcing parser to request cost in a strict order.
This limitation is forbids future parser with skipping capabilities.
After this patch, caching literals price still exists,
but is now explicit, in a stack structure.
Fixes issue where, when `zstd --format=lz4` is fed an input larger than 128KB,
the read overruns the input buffer. This changes Zstd to use LZ4 with chained
64KB blocks. This is technically a breaking change in that some third party
LZ4 implementations may not support linked blocks. However, progress should not
be allowed to be stopped by such petty concerns as backwards compatibility!
Yann Collet
Yann Collet
Nick Terrell
W. Felix Handte