alt Hacker NewsI built "fc", a C library for compressing streams of 64-bit floating-point values without quantization.
It is not trying to replace zstd or lz4. The idea is narrower: take blocks of doubles, try a set of float-specific predictors/transforms/coders, and emit whichever representation is smallest for that block.
It is aimed at time-series, scientific, simulation, and analytics data where the numbers often have structure: smooth curves, repeated values, fixed increments, periodic signals, predictable deltas, or low-entropy mantissas.
The API is intentionally small: "fc_enc", "fc_dec", a config struct, and a few counters to inspect which modes won. Decode is parallel and meant to be fast; encode spends more CPU searching for a better representation.
Current caveats: x86-64 only for now, tuned for IEEE-754 doubles, research-grade rather than production-hardened.
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Does it assume the floats come from photos or sound or something?
What do you mean by decode is parallel?
> rather than production-hardened.
Please run it through your preferred AI once or twice with instruction to look for bugs. The version of Fc in the main branch has at least a few memory safety bugs that attacker-controlled inputs could exploit.
I'd link a chat history but the tool I used has that feature blocked for some weird reason, and the locals round these parts don't take kindly to copy-pasted AI content...