FreeArc

Last updated
freearc
Developer(s) Bulat Ziganshin
Final release
0.666 [1]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 20 May 2010
Preview release
0.60 RC [2]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 5 October 2009
Repository
Written in Haskell, C++, C
Operating system Microsoft Windows, Linux
Platform IA-32
Type File archiver
License GPL-2.0-only [3] [4]
Website freearc.org at the Wayback Machine (archived 2016-11-18)

FreeArc is a free and open-source high-performance file archiver developed by Bulat Ziganshin. The project is presumably discontinued, since no information has been released by the developers since 2016 and the official website is down.

Contents

A "FreeArc Next" version is under development, with version FA 0.11 released in October 2016. [5] The "Next" version supports 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux and includes Zstandard support. [6]

Algorithms

FreeArc uses LZMA, prediction by partial matching, TrueAudio, Tornado and GRzip [7] algorithms with automatic switching by file type. Additionally, it uses filters to further improve compression, including REP (finds repetitions at separations up to 1gb), DICT (dictionary replacements for text), DELTA (improves compression of tables in binary data), BCJ (executables preproccesor) and LZP (removes repetitions in text). [8]

Benchmarks

Archive size

In 2010 Tom's Hardware benchmarks comparing it to the other popular archivers, FreeArc narrowly outperformed WinZip, 7-Zip, and WinRAR in its "best compression" mode. In the "default compression" tests, it lost to 7-Zip's LZMA2, but still compressed better than WinRAR and WinZip. [9]

Speed

In the same Tom's Hardware tests, FreeArc was outpaced at default settings by 7zip's LZMA2 default compression, and also by WinRAR, even at its best compression settings. FreeArc's compression at its best settings was slower than both 7zip and WinRAR, but still came ahead of WinZip. [9]

Efficiency

In a metric devised by Werner Bergmans of Maximum Compression Benchmark, FreeArc compression is more efficient than programs for classic formats like .Z (LZW), .zip (Deflate), .gz or bzip2. (The scoring formula used in this non-public test,

multiplies the sum of compression and decompression times by a factor that exponentially grades the ratio of archive sizes achieved by the program under test relative to the best known archive size for that data set.) As of November 2010, FreeArc is the top program in this benchmark, followed by NanoZip, bsc and WinRAR. It works faster than WinRAR and 7zip. [10]

Features

freearc
Filename extension
.arc
Internet media type
application/x-freearc
Developed byBulat Ziganshin
Type of format Data compression

Like RAR and ZIP it is an archiver, not just a data compressor like gzip or bzip2. Initially it supported only its own archive format, normally identified by the .arc file name extension, incompatible with others; [8] there is no relationship with other .arc formats. More recently,[ when? ] decompression support for other archive types was added, including zip, rar, and 7z. FreeArc has both a command line interface and a GUI. [10] Other features include:

Supported platforms

Windows binaries are available from the developer. There is no 64-bit variant of version 0.666, [11] but FA 0.11 supported both 32- and 64-bit systems. [5]

FreeArc Next

In October 2016 the first public release of FreeArc Next was released. [5] [12] It is currently available only as a CLI application for 32 and 64 bit Windows and Linux platforms. New features include:

See also

Related Research Articles

Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistical redundancy. By contrast, lossy compression permits reconstruction only of an approximation of the original data, though usually with greatly improved compression rates.

bzip2 File compression software

bzip2 is a free and open-source file compression program that uses the Burrows–Wheeler algorithm. It only compresses single files and is not a file archiver. It relies on separate external utilities for tasks such as handling multiple files, encryption, and archive-splitting.

ZIP is an archive file format that supports lossless data compression. A ZIP file may contain one or more files or directories that may have been compressed. The ZIP file format permits a number of compression algorithms, though DEFLATE is the most common. This format was originally created in 1989 and was first implemented in PKWARE, Inc.'s PKZIP utility, as a replacement for the previous ARC compression format by Thom Henderson. The ZIP format was then quickly supported by many software utilities other than PKZIP. Microsoft has included built-in ZIP support in versions of Microsoft Windows since 1998 via the "Plus! 98" addon for Windows 98. Native support was added as of the year 2000 in Windows ME. Apple has included built-in ZIP support in Mac OS X 10.3 and later. Most free operating systems have built in support for ZIP in similar manners to Windows and macOS.

compress is a Unix shell compression program based on the LZW compression algorithm. Compared to gzip's fastest setting, compress is slightly slower at compression, slightly faster at decompression, and has a significantly lower compression ratio. 1.8 MiB of memory is used to compress the Hutter Prize data, slightly more than gzip's slowest setting.

RAR is a proprietary archive file format that supports data compression, error correction and file spanning. It was developed in 1993 by Russian software engineer Eugene Roshal and the software is licensed by win.rar GmbH. The name RAR stands for Roshal Archive.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">7-Zip</span> Open-source file archiver

7-Zip is a free and open-source file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as "archives". It is developed by Igor Pavlov and was first released in 1999. 7-Zip has its own archive format called 7z, but can read and write several others.

The Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) is an algorithm used to perform lossless data compression. It has been under development since either 1996 or 1998 by Igor Pavlov and was first used in the 7z format of the 7-Zip archiver. This algorithm uses a dictionary compression scheme somewhat similar to the LZ77 algorithm published by Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv in 1977 and features a high compression ratio and a variable compression-dictionary size, while still maintaining decompression speed similar to other commonly used compression algorithms.

7z is a compressed archive file format that supports several different data compression, encryption and pre-processing algorithms. The 7z format initially appeared as implemented by the 7-Zip archiver. The 7-Zip program is publicly available under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. The LZMA SDK 4.62 was placed in the public domain in December 2008. The latest stable version of 7-Zip and LZMA SDK is version 24.05.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">StuffIt Expander</span> File decompressor software utility

StuffIt Expander is a proprietary, freeware, closed source, decompression software utility developed by Allume Systems. It runs on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows. Prior to 2011, a Linux version had also been available for download.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WinRAR</span> File archiver

WinRAR is a trialware file archiver utility for Windows, developed by Eugene Roshal of win.rar GmbH. It can create and view archives in RAR or ZIP file formats, and unpack numerous archive file formats. To enable the user to test the integrity of archives, WinRAR embeds CRC32 or BLAKE2 checksums for each file in each archive. WinRAR supports creating encrypted, multi-part and self-extracting archives.

rzip is a huge-scale data compression computer program designed around initial LZ77-style string matching on a 900 MB dictionary window, followed by bzip2-based Burrows–Wheeler transform and entropy coding (Huffman) on 900 kB output chunks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TUGZip</span>

TUGZip is a freeware file archiver for Microsoft Windows. It handles a great variety of archive formats, including some of the commonly used ones like zip, rar, gzip, bzip2, sqx and 7z. It can also view disk image files like BIN, C2D, IMG, ISO and NRG. TugZip repairs corrupted ZIP archives and can encrypt files with 6 different algorithms.

The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of file archivers. Please see the individual products' articles for further information. They are neither all-inclusive nor are some entries necessarily up to date. Unless otherwise specified in the footnotes section, comparisons are based on the stable versions—without add-ons, extensions or external programs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-extracting archive</span> Computer executable program

A self-extracting archive is a computer executable program which combines compressed data in an archive file with machine-executable code to extract the information. Running on a compatible operating system, it does not need a suitable extractor in the target computer to extract the data. The executable part of the file is known as a decompressor stub.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ALZip</span> Software

ALZip is an archive and compression utility software application from ESTsoft for Microsoft Windows that can unzip 40 different zip file archives. ALZip can zip files into eight different archive formats such as ZIP, EGG, TAR, and others. Introduced in ALZip version 8, the EGG archive format can be used, which supports Unicode and other features.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PeaZip</span> File archive computer program

PeaZip is a free and open-source file manager and file archiver for Microsoft Windows, ReactOS, Linux, MacOS and BSD by Giorgio Tani. It supports its native PEA archive format and other mainstream formats, with special focus on handling open formats. Version 9.4.0 supported 234 file extensions.

XZ Utils is a set of free software command-line lossless data compressors, including the programs lzma and xz, for Unix-like operating systems and, from version 5.0 onwards, Microsoft Windows. For compression/decompression the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) is used. XZ Utils started as a Unix port of Igor Pavlov's LZMA-SDK that has been adapted to fit seamlessly into Unix environments and their usual structure and behavior.

lzip Data compression utility

lzip is a free, command-line tool for the compression of data; it employs the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) with a user interface that is familiar to users of usual Unix compression tools, such as gzip and bzip2.

Zstandard is a lossless data compression algorithm developed by Yann Collet at Facebook. Zstd is the corresponding reference implementation in C, released as open-source software on 31 August 2016.

References

  1. ↑ "Freearc news".
  2. ↑ Error: Unable to display the reference properly. See the documentation for details.
  3. ↑ "FreeArc news". 2009-12-21. Archived from the original on 2016-11-22. Finally, we have added License file clearly stating that FreeArc is free for any usage.
  4. ↑ "FreeArc : Develop" . Retrieved 2009-08-17. license: GPL
  5. 1 2 3 "FreeArc 'Next". encode.su. Archived from the original on 2020-04-15. Retrieved 2020-10-15.
  6. ↑ FA 0.11 release notes, Bulat Ziganshin
  7. ↑ "grzip - Freecode". sourceforge.net. Retrieved 9 July 2021.
  8. 1 2 3 Patrick Schmid, Achim Roos, (March 10, 2010) 7-Zip 9.1 Beta And FreeArc 0.60 , Tom's Hardware
  9. 1 2 "Proprietary Formats: Compression Rate, Size, And Duration - Four Compression And Archiving Solutions Compared". 10 March 2010. Retrieved 25 June 2016.
  10. 1 2 "FreeArc - Kompressionsprogramm mit eigenem Format" (in German)., golem.de
  11. ↑ "FreeArc Download page". Archived from the original on 2012-01-18. Retrieved 2012-01-07.
  12. ↑ "Bulat-Ziganshin/FA". GitHub. Retrieved 2016-10-15.
  13. ↑ "facebook/zstd". GitHub. Retrieved 2016-10-15.
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