marco6/calco

Compression Algorithm for Low-end COmputers

calco 🦶🏽🍇 - Compression Algorithm for Low-end Computers

Calco¹ (Compression Algorithm for Low-end COmputers) is a C++20 library designed for mildly compressing text strings efficiently.

Purpose

The primary focus of Calco is on execution speed and minimizing instruction count rather than achieving the highest compression ratio. Its intended use case revolves around low-end microcontrollers where ROM size is a limited resource.

Functionality

This library aims to assist in:

• Reducing transmitted data size.
• Shrinking the firmware image size.

Calco achieves the latter by enabling the compression of constant strings during compile time, which can then be decompressed during runtime when required.

Compression Efficiency

While the maximum achievable compression ratio is around 25%, in practical scenarios, a more realistic measure falls within the range of 15-20%.

Footnotes

1. /ˈkal.koː/, first person of the Latin verb calcāre: to press with the foot/to crush the grapes (with the feet). ↩