If it hasn't seen an upstream release since 2019, doesn't that mean the implementation is just... finished?
Maybe there's no more bugs to fix and features to add. And in that case, I don't see what's wrong with it.
Isn't 10-15% faster compression, and 5-10% faster decompression, a very nice "feature"?
> [...] doesn't that mean the implementation is just... finished?
I don't think that it _necessarily_ means that, e.g. all projects that haven't had a release since 2019 aren't finished? Probably most of them are simply abandoned?
On the other hand, a finished implementation is certainly a _possible_ explanation for why there have been no releases.
In this specific case, there are a handful of open bugs on their issue tracker. So that would indicate that the project isn't finished.
"Isn't 10-15% faster compression, and 5-10% faster decompression, a very nice «feature»?"
Although much code can be optimized to get it to run 10-15% faster, if that comes at the expense of legibility then such "feature" get rejected nowadays. Translating an existing codebase into a language that makes things more difficult¹ and (because of that) has (and most likely will have) fewer engineers willing to working in it looks very much akin to applying legibility-affecting optimizations to me.
LinusU|8 months ago
> [...] doesn't that mean the implementation is just... finished?
I don't think that it _necessarily_ means that, e.g. all projects that haven't had a release since 2019 aren't finished? Probably most of them are simply abandoned?
On the other hand, a finished implementation is certainly a _possible_ explanation for why there have been no releases.
In this specific case, there are a handful of open bugs on their issue tracker. So that would indicate that the project isn't finished.
ref: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?product=bzip2
restalis|8 months ago
Although much code can be optimized to get it to run 10-15% faster, if that comes at the expense of legibility then such "feature" get rejected nowadays. Translating an existing codebase into a language that makes things more difficult¹ and (because of that) has (and most likely will have) fewer engineers willing to working in it looks very much akin to applying legibility-affecting optimizations to me.
¹ ...and not only. I've already described in other comments some of the issues I see with it as a software development tool, here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31565024 here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33390634 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42241516