This is more of a rant rather than anything useful, although I do give a link to an awesome JQuery library for zipping and unzipping files, so stick around!

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now (well, for a day), but I still can not come up with a good reason why not everything data-wise on a PC (or going through a CPU) is being handled in a compressed format?, I mean sure music and movies are generally traded around the internet in a very highly compressed format, but why not extend this to every file on disk, infact I would even take it one step further.

I would actually create a separate PC component (ships with CPUs) that handles the compressing and uncompressing of data seamlessly for the user, everything stays compressed unless it is being requested by an entity that is unable to handle compressed formats (for example, human readability), then it is uncompressed using the CPU’s compression engine for user viewing, and returned (saved?) to disk after user interrogation and after being compressed using this new CPU compression engine.

It just makes absolute sense, I mean it is very silly that computers still are dealing with data in an uncompressed format, it just doesn’t make sense! why not speak a language that could be up to 90% more efficient?, what are the implications of compressing everything tho?

• Faster I/O: This is a HUGE plus, if everything is compressed, then reading and writing to disk will be a lot faster, since there are less bytes to read/write.
• Slower CPU: In order to manipulate compressed data, the CPU will have to uncompress this data (in memory sometimes), this decompression will cause some stress on the CPU while the algorithm is executing, although with today’s PCs, this over-head is considerably low, and considering that the bottleneck for most computational systems is I/O, this processing time will be easily recovered in terms of I/O wait time.

Anyway just a thought, and a rant.

Here is a very awesome JavaScript library that actually performs compression (ZIP) in JS.