This last week I decided to sit down and hash out a simple Huffman compression routine using C#. I’d never created a compression routine before from scratch (my past implementations were static for the sake of time savings), so I fleshed one out. I know that many examples exist elsewhere on the net…. but they all seemed overly complicated and up their own ass

I had a couple goals in mind while creating my routine:

1. KEEP IT SIMPLE — A lot of routines out there WORK, but their code is too overly complicated for their own good. This over complication leads to slowness which brings me to my next goal It should be a simple class that accepts input data, with simple public accessors that are easy to understand even for the novice developer (sorry folks, no asynchronous delegates).

2. MAKE IT FAST — When dealing with large amounts of data in C#, especially when running it through an algorithm, it’s all too easy to use all the handy built in virtual methods or using other build in tools which make coding easier with speed being the sacrifice. Die hard C++ developers will point to these routines as C#’s downfall as a legitimate language when it comes to data intensive tasks.

Continue reading “Example Huffman Compression Routine in C#” »