misa77 (0.6.0)

misa77 is an LZ-based codec that targets the write-once, read-many niche. In particular, it aims to satisfy the following criteria:

• Extremely high decompression throughput (single-threaded).
• Modest compression ratios (LZ4 at high effort levels is a good reference point).
• Constant memory use during compression, regardless of input size. Decompression uses no extra memory.

Slow compression is the obvious tradeoff that one makes to achieve the above.

misa77 has six compression effort levels as of v0.6.0. For most shapes of data, encode time increases and ratio decreases with increasing level, but decompression throughput is not similarly monotonic. In general, level 1 offers the fastest decode throughput. More information about effort levels can be found here.

There are two decompressor modes:

• unsafe: passing invalid input to this mode is UB.
• safe: guaranteed to exit gracefully (ie. provably terminate, and not access out-of-bounds memory or engage in any other UB) in the case of corrupt/malicious input, is typically ~5% slower than unsafe.

Note: As of now, level 4 doesn't have a safe decompressor. It will be added soon.

Benchmarks

Detailed results are listed ahead, but here's a terse summary:

• misa77 lies on the pareto frontier for decompression throughput vs compression ratio on most shapes of data.
• It very frequently decompresses faster even when competitors have a significantly worse ratio.
• It is somewhat slow at compression.
• Performance is a bit sensitive to codegen, but even with the worst possible codegen I saw in my testing, misa77 was significantly faster than other codecs.

Let's first see some cross-platform results for the Silesia Corpus.

Note:

1. "Ratio" ahead is equal to ((compressed size)/(original)) * 100 (so lower is better).
2. misa77 has been merged into lzbench and TurboBench. The results below have been produced using lzbench, and can be reproduced through both benchmarking harnesses.
3. In the tables ahead, rows are grouped by codec family, and ordered from lowest to highest effort level within each family. The misa77 default level (1) is in bold.
4. The tables show unsafe (trusted-input) decompression. The safe decoder costs about 3% of decode throughput on the x86-64 setup and 1-2% on the M3 for these files.

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Intel x86-64

Details:

• CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-14650HX (@2.2 GHz) (Intel Turbo disabled).
• Single threaded, pinned to a single performance core.
• CPU governor set to performance.

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ARM64 (Apple Silicon)

Details:

• CPU: Apple M3

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As misa77's performance is quite "spiky" (depending on the shape of the data being compressed), a file-level breakdown for the silesia corpus yields some interesting insights into its performance.

Note:

• The visuals that follow are derived from the benchmark results at misc/lzbench-results-archive/0.6.0/intel.txt
• These results are with the same x86-64 (Intel) setup mentioned previously.

Decode speed relative to lz4

At level 1, misa77 decodes faster than lz4 on all 12 files (some by huge margins).

Throughput vs ratio, against popular fast-decode codecs

On the compressible files, misa77 sits on the decode-throughput/ratio Pareto frontier: it decodes fastest while ~matching or beating the ratio of the other fast-LZ codecs. (x-ray and sao are exceptions as most compressors have a ratio near 1, and their decode essentially devolves to a memcpy).

To spot misa77 in these graphs, just look for the circles near the top :)

Levels

Levels are ordered by compression effort. For most shapes of data, encode time increases and ratio decreases with increasing level, but decompression throughput is not similarly monotonic.

• Ratio is measured on silesia.tar in the Intel run.
• The Encode/Decode vs L1 columns are relative to level 1, given as the range spanned by the Intel and M3 runs.
• Encoder memory is the compressor's own working state (disjoint from the caller's input and output buffers). Decompression needs no working memory at all.
• Levels -1 to 3 emit the light format (see docs/format.md) and have a safe decoder. Level 4 emits the heavy format, which does not have one yet.

Requirements

For the library:

• A C++20 compiler (both GCC and Clang are fine).
• CMake >= 3.20.
• A little-endian 64-bit system.

For the CLI:

• The misa CLI needs POSIX (Linux, macOS).

Note: On x86-64, AVX2/SSE2 are selected at runtime. ARM has a NEON path.

Building

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build

This produces the misa CLI at build/misa. For a binary tuned to the exact machine you'll run it on, add -DMISA77_MARCH=native (I recommend this). To run the round-trip test:

ctest --test-dir build

Library Usage

The build produces a static library (CMake target misa77) with a small C++ API in misa77/misa77.h. The easiest integration is a git submodule (or CMake FetchContent) plus:

add_subdirectory(misa77)
target_link_libraries(your_app PRIVATE misa77)

Sample usage:

#include <misa77/misa77.h>
#include <vector>

// compress (pick a level with misa77::config(N) with N in [-1, 4], default is 1), returns 0 on failure
misa77::config cfg;
std::vector<uint8_t> compressed(misa77::compress_bound(input_size, cfg));
uint64_t csize = misa77::compress(input, input_size, compressed.data(), compressed.size(), cfg);
compressed.resize(csize);

// decompress, returns original_size on success
uint64_t original_size = misa77::decompressed_size(compressed.data());
std::vector<uint8_t> output(misa77::decompressed_buffer_bound(original_size));
// decompress uses the unsafe decompressor by default, pass dconfig(true) to use the safe decompressor
uint64_t written = misa77::decompress(compressed.data(), csize, output.data(), output.size(), misa77::dconfig(true));

Three things to keep in mind:

• You must size the destination buffers with compress_bound / decompressed_buffer_bound, passing compress_bound the same config you compress with (the bound depends on the level's format).
• You must pass misa77::dconfig(true) to misa77::decompress if you want the decompressor to exit gracefully on invalid input.
• Safe decompression does not support level-4 streams yet: decompress with dconfig(true) returns 0 for them (the unsafe path decodes them fine).

The experimental modes are declared in misa77/experimental.h, with usage documented in comments (these keep changing frequently so I don't wanna "formally" document them here just yet).

CLI Usage

misa is a single, dependency-free binary with two file-based subcommands. It operates on single files only (there's no directory or pipe support, so tar first if you need those).

misa compress   FILE          # -> FILE.misa77
misa decompress FILE.misa77   # -> FILE

misa compress takes -l N / --level N to pick the compression level (default is 1). Everywhere, -o PATH sets the output path and -f overwrites without asking.

misa compress -l 0 enwik8                # enwik8 -> enwik8.misa77
misa decompress enwik8.misa77 -f         # back to enwik8

Documentation

The underlying stream formats (used by the library functions) and the container format for .misa77 files (produced by the CLI) can be found in docs/.

Status

1. misa77's format may change unexpectedly as it's still v0.x.y.
2. It's been through local fuzzing with ASan/UBSan, broader hardening is ongoing.

Note: misa77 has evolved out of a less polished endeavour to learn performance engineering, and its history can be found in this archived repository.

Acknowledgement

Inspiration has been taken from:

• LZ4
• zxc
• lizard
• m77rip
• various people on encode.su

Lastly, the following models helped a lot with orchestrating experiments, scripting, tooling, and building the CLI. Without their assistance, development would have been far slower, and I would likely not have explored all the paths that I did end up exploring (some of which were productive and some of which weren't).

• Claude Fable 5
• Claude Opus 5
• Claude Opus 4.8

License

MIT (see LICENSE).