In an effort to get better at programming assembly, and as an academic exercise, I would like to write a non-trivial program in x86 assembly. Since file compression has always been kind of an interest to me, I would like to write something like the zip utility in assembly.
I’m not exactly out of my element here, having written a simple web server using assembly and coded for embedded devices, and I’ve read some of the material for zlib (and others) and played with its C implementation.
My problem is finding a routine that is simple enough to port to assembly. Many of the utilities I’ve inspected thus far are full of #define‘s and other included code. Since this is really just for me to play with, I’m not really interested in super-awesome compression ratios or anything like that. I’m basically just looking for the RC4 of compression algorithms.
Is a Huffman Coding the path I should be looking down or does anyone have another suggestion?
And here is a more sophisticated algorithm which should not be too hard to implement: LZ77 (containing assembly examples) or LZ77 (this site contains many different compression algorithms).