My tests with brotli is that is it overrated - it is slow and has poor compression ratios compared to xz. It confuses me why it is being pushed so hard...
Brotli does not work well for bhoustons use case, so his original wish stands and your helpful suggestion that he should be able to use Brotli in the near future does unfortunately not fulfill his wish.
Yeah, the example given by GP involves large binary streams. Brotli was designed for small text documents with lots of English words in them, as we often see on the web.
Where does it say that Brotli is for small English text documents? I didn't see anything like that in the draft spec or the Google blog post.
The spec doesn't say much on the subject but has this item in the Purpouse section: "Compresses data with a compression ratio comparable to the best currently available general-purpose compression methods and in particular considerably better than the gzip program"
Yes, it has that optimization for short data (though it's not restricted to English), but the PR and specs say it's still meant to be a general purpouse compressor. And it does very well on most types of large data.
It's a real problem in a compressor proposed for general purpouse use when it's shown that a naturally occurring major class of data has this bad performance.
