Goals

The idea for Fairytale was born in the encode.ru forum. The main goals we're commiting to are:

• Getting many people involved: After the rough archiver skeleton is ready, it should be as easy as possible for people to join the project, test their ideas, benchmark the archiver and use it to get their stuff compressed.
• Modularity/extensibility: For developers, it should be easy to create new modules to compress certain file formats or replace existing modules
• Flexibility: Users will decide what they want - experimental state-of-the-art compression (something like paq/cmix/EMMA), practical max. compression (everything above 1 MB/s, for example), very fast compression or even deduplication only
• Early prototypes: Users and benchmarkers should be able to start right away with the first versions, both a CLI and a GUI should be available, satisfying both simple (just compress it) and advanced (let's see what this parameter does) use cases
• Wide range of algorithms: Texts, images, audio, structured data, recompressing already compressed data, ... - and if you're missing something or want to test something, feel free to do so!
• Documentation, teaching, best practices, showcase: Just like Matt Mahoney's DCE that shows that compression is no black magic and there are many different facets of compression, documentation in the project should be good and design choices should be explained, so even if people won't contribute, they can browse the code or the wiki and learn something.