They kicked off the article saying that no one uses bzip2 anymore. A million cycles saved for something no one uses (according to them) is still 0% battery life saved.
If modern CPUs are so power efficient and have so many spare cycles to allocate to e.g. eye candy no one asked for, then no one is counting and the comparison is irrelevant.
It sounds like the main motivation for the conversion was to simplify builds and reduce the chance of security issues. Old parts of protocols that no one pays much attention to anymore does seem to be a common place where those pop up. The performance gain looks more like just a nice side effect of the rewrite, I imagine they were at most targeting performance parity.
The Wikipedia data dumps [0] are multistream bz2. This makes them relatively easy to partially ingest, and I'm happy to be able to remove the C dependency from the Rust code I have that deals with said dumps.
The same could be said of many things that, nonetheless, are still used by many, and will continue to be used by many for decades to come. A thing does not need to be best to justify someone wanting to make it a bit better.
“Best” is measured along a lot more axis than just performance. And you don’t always get to choose what format you use. It may be dictated to you by some 3rd party you can’t influence.
bzip2 is still pretty good if you want to optimize for:
- better compression ratio than gzip
- faster compression than many better-than-gzip competitors
- lower CPU/RAM usage for the same compression ratio/time
This is a niche, but it does crop up sometimes. The downside to bzip2 is that it is slow to decompress, but for write-heavy workloads, that doesn't matter too much.
So? If I need to consume a resource compressed using bz2, I'm not just going to sit around and wait for them to use zstd. I'm going to break out bz2. If I can use a modern rewrite that's faster, I'll take every advantage I can get.
If modern CPUs are so power efficient and have so many spare cycles to allocate to e.g. eye candy no one asked for, then no one is counting and the comparison is irrelevant.