[jimktrains2]

Isn't bzip used quite a bit, especially for tar files?

[Philpax]

The Wikipedia data dumps [0] are multistream bz2. This makes them relatively easy to partially ingest, and I'm happy to be able to remove the C dependency from the Rust code I have that deals with said dumps.

[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...

[jeffbee]

If so, only by misguided users. Why would anyone choose bz2 in 2025?

[0x457]

To unpack an archive made from the time when bz2 was used?

[ben-schaaf]

Of course no one uses systems, tools and files created before 2025!

[kbolino]

bzip2 is still pretty good if you want to optimize for:

  - better compression ratio than gzip
  - faster compression than many better-than-gzip competitors
  - lower CPU/RAM usage for the same compression ratio/time

This is a niche, but it does crop up sometimes. The downside to bzip2 is that it is slow to decompress, but for write-heavy workloads, that doesn't matter too much.

[Twirrim]

So? If I need to consume a resource compressed using bz2, I'm not just going to sit around and wait for them to use zstd. I'm going to break out bz2. If I can use a modern rewrite that's faster, I'll take every advantage I can get.