Building a compressor that competes on complete archive size

Compression experiments can look compelling when they report only the transformed file or one favorable sample. I’m building PIZD, a Rust project exploring pattern discovery and structural coding, and I want its comparisons to answer a more practical question: what happens to the complete archive?

Start with a reversible contract

Every candidate has to preserve exact restoration. A smaller output is not useful if decoding changes even one source byte.

Measure the whole result

A transform can add metadata. The relevant comparison includes that overhead and the rest of the archive, not just the part the transform targets.

Make trade-offs visible

Some experimental formats need a current reader, and extra analysis can cost time. Those are part of the result, not footnotes to hide.

PIZD is still an unpublished release candidate.…