Pierre Mai released his new deflate inflating library yesterday, so I did little bit of testing against Chipz. On my Core 2 Duo system with 64-bit SBCL, Chipz is about 25% faster at inflating. Pierre says his program is "...for those who need something with a less restrictive license or better performance than is currently freely available", but it seems to me that the main advantage over Chipz is that it has a very simple interface and lives in a single file.

I didn't try it against inflate.cl because that file was recently updated and uses Allegro CL-specific code now.

Also, when fiddling around making a test file, I was pleased to see this:

(time (salza2:gzip-file "kjv10.txt" "kjv10.salza2.gz")) Evaluation took: 0.546 seconds of real time 0.540000 seconds of total run time (0.540000 user, 0.000000 system) 98.90% CPU 981,743,175 processor cycles 279,984 bytes consed

$ time gzip -c kjv10.txt > kjv10.gzip.gz real 0m0.624s user 0m0.630s sys 0m0.000s

But sad to see this:

$ ls -l kjv10.*.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 xach xach 1403140 2009-06-04 06:52 kjv10.gzip.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 xach xach 2014735 2009-06-04 06:52 kjv10.salza2.gz

It's not so hard to be fast when you do a bad job. :)