HySnappy

Snappy decompression with WebAssembly.

A fast, minimal snappy decompression implementation in C built for WASM.

Snappy compression was released by Google in 2011 with the goal of very high speeds and reasonable compression. Snappy is used in various applications. For example, snappy is the default compression format for Apache Parquet files.

Usage

The snappyUncompress function expects as arguments: a typed array compressed, and an outputLength parameter. The length is needed to know how much wasm memory to allocate. For formats like parquet, this length will generally be known in advance. To decompress a Uint8Array with known output length:

import { snappyUncompress } from 'hysnappy'

const compressed = new Uint8Array([
  0x0a, 0x24, 0x68, 0x79, 0x70, 0x65, 0x72, 0x70, 0x61, 0x72, 0x61, 0x6d
])
const outputLength = 10
const output = snappyUncompress(compressed, outputLength)

Hyparquet

Hysnappy was built specifically to accelerate the the hyparquet parquet parsing library.

Hysnappy exports a loader function snappyUncompressor() which loads the WASM module once, and returns a pre-loaded version of snappyUncompress function.

To use hysnappy with hyparquet:

import { parquetRead } from 'hyparquet'
import { snappyUncompressor } from 'hysnappy'

parquetRead({ file, compressors: {
  SNAPPY: snappyUncompressor(),
}})

Development

The build uses clang without emscripten, in order to produce the smallest possible binary.

Run make to build from source. The build process consists of:

1. Compile from snappy.c to hysnappy.wasm using clang.
2. Encode hysnappy.wasm as base64 to hysnappy.wasm.base64.
3. Insert base64 string into hysnappy.js for distribution.

WASM Loading

By keeping hysnappy.wasm under 4kb, we can include it directly in the hysnappy.js file and load the WASM blob synchronously, which is faster than loading a separate .wasm file. [web.dev]

References

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snappy_(compression)
• https://github.com/andikleen/snappy-c
• https://github.com/google/snappy
• https://github.com/zhipeng-jia/snappyjs
• https://web.dev/articles/loading-wasm