Click here to Skip to main content
65,938 articles
CodeProject is changing. Read more.
Articles / Languages / C#

Pure C# MiniLZO port

4.88/5 (21 votes)
22 Dec 20061 min read 1   1.7K  
Fast stream compression using a ported minilzo for .NET.

Introduction

I was recently in a position where I needed to find a fast streamable compression solution.  The great source by Markus Oberhumer provided the answer. After using the C code for a while, I realized C#/.NET lacked a similar library, short of one I found which was commercial.

As a result, I decided to attempt a minimalistic port of MiniLZO compression and decompression into pure C#. At this point, the code uses unsafe/fixed blocks to best mimic the original minilzo implementation. A pure managed solution may be soon to follow (at the cost of speed).

The code has not been unit tested 100%, but all initial tests have been successful. If anyone finds any bugs, please report them so I may fix it. I also have not done any profiling of the speed yet, if anyone feels upto the task of comparing it against the C implementation.

Use of the code is relatively simple, here is a quick example.

Compression

C#
byte[] original = File.ReadAllBytes("...");
byte[] destination;
MiniLZO.Compress(original, out destination);

Decompression

C#
byte[] destination = ...; /* Resulting buffer from above */
byte[] original = new byte[x];
MiniLZO.Decompress(destination, original);

Note that with compression, the destination buffer will be assigned and trimmed to the correct size. With decompression, the "original" buffer must be preallocated with the correct original size. Also note that my implementation removed all use of goto from the original source, and replaces certain uses with OverflowExceptions.

License

This article has no explicit license attached to it but may contain usage terms in the article text or the download files themselves. If in doubt please contact the author via the discussion board below.

A list of licenses authors might use can be found here