July 15, 2026
Compressed files, expanded drama
Show HN: misa77 - a codec that decodes 2x faster than LZ4 (at better ratios)
New file-squeezing tool claims crazy speed, and the comments are already arguing
TLDR: misa77 says it can unpack files much faster than a popular rival while also shrinking them more, which could matter for games and other read-heavy apps. Commenters were split between excitement over the speed and skepticism over safety, real-world comparisons, and whether the benchmark bragging tells the whole story.
A new compression tool called misa77 just strutted onto Hacker News with a bold flex: it says it can unpack files about twice as fast as LZ4, a popular speed-focused standard, while also making those files a bit smaller. In plain English, that means data could load faster without ballooning in size. The catch? It takes its sweet time when creating those compressed files in the first place. The creator is openly targeting a very specific use case: data you save once and read over and over, like game assets or big archives.
And yes, the community immediately turned this into a mini-drama. One camp was genuinely hyped, with one commenter saying this could be exactly what they want for loading maps in a game engine. Another basically did the classic nerd double-take: faster than LZ4 and smaller too? That got people’s attention fast. But the skeptics arrived just as quickly. One commenter threw out the hilariously cryptic “What’s the Weissman score?”, which landed like a deadpan meme for benchmark obsessives. Another came in with the serious reality check: if the format isn’t tough against broken or malicious data, then these speed comparisons may not be apples-to-apples.
That split is the real story here. Fans see a potential speed demon for real-world projects. Critics want safety details, integration examples, and tougher comparisons against heavyweight rivals like Oodle. In other words: the benchmark charts impressed people, but the comment section wants receipts.
Key Points
- •misa77 0.2.0 is an LZ-based codec designed for write-once, read-many workloads with emphasis on very high single-threaded decompression throughput.
- •The article states that misa77 uses constant memory regardless of input size, with up to 5 MB during compression and 0 MB for decompression.
- •misa77 v0.2.0 offers two compression effort levels: level 0 for higher decode throughput and slightly worse ratio, and level 1 for better ratio with slightly lower decode throughput.
- •The benchmark section reports that misa77 is on the pareto frontier for decompression throughput versus compression ratio on many data shapes, while noting that compression is slow.
- •On the listed Intel x86-64 benchmark setup, misa77 records decompression speeds above 4 GB/s on both the Silesia Corpus and enwik8, exceeding the listed LZ4 decompression results on those datasets.