Snappy Compression Library

Snappy is a high-speed compression/decompression library designed for very high speeds and reasonable compression ratios rather than maximum compression. It is optimized for performance, often being an order of magnitude faster than the fastest mode of zlib, though resulting files may be 20% to 100% larger.

Key performance characteristics (on a single Core i7 64-bit core):

• Compression: ~250 MB/sec or more
• Decompression: ~500 MB/sec or more.

To build Snappy, you must have the version of CMake specified in the CMakeLists.txt file or a later version installed. Follow these steps to initialize submodules and compile the library using CMake and Make:

git submodule update --init
mkdir build
cd build && cmake ../ && make

Snappy is implemented in C++. To use it in your C++ application, include snappy.h in your source files and link against the compiled Snappy library. The simplest way to compress and decompress data is using std::string objects for both input and output.

snappy::Compress(input.data(), input.size(), &output);

// To decompress:
snappy::Uncompress(input.data(), input.size(), &output);

When you build the project, several utility binaries are created. These are useful for verifying correctness and performance on your specific hardware:

• snappy_benchmark: Contains microbenchmarks for tuning performance.
• snappy_unittests: Contains unit tests to verify correctness.
• snappy_test_tool: Benchmarks Snappy against other libraries (like zlib, LZO, LZF, or QuickLZ) if they were detected during configuration. To use it, provide a flag for the target algorithm (e.g., --zlib) followed by the file names to test.