Andres -

>>	High-speed compression and a compact forms package
>>		We have improved Squeak's bitmap compression and compiled
>>		it into a primitive.  It is possible to compress every form in the
>>		system, and only decompress when BitBlt acutally needs it.
>
>Just wondering about this... exactly what speed is high-speed? Is it 
>100kb/sec? More? Less? What algorithm did you implement?

The entire code is in Squeak (of course) in the beta image.
You can find it as Bitmap>>compressToByteArray.
The algorithm is an Ingalls original designed to be dog-simple
and optimized for full-word operations (in case we ever want
to do a front-end for BitBlt that will expand on the fly).

Here is a simple timing test done on my display bitmap (1008x716 in 16-bit color).  Most of the screen is covered by 4 large browsers, and there are 15 collapsed windows running down the left-hand side...

Display bits size*4 ==> 1443456
Display bits compressToByteArray size ==> 149902
Time millisecondsToRun: [10 timesRepeat: [Display bits compressToByteArray]] ==> 1179

So it's compressing 1.4MB by nearly a factor of 10 in under .12 seconds, a throughput of around 12MB/sec.  This is on a 180MHz Mac 8600.  Expansion is naturally a little faster.

	- Dan