huffman

An implementation of the Huffman code in C17.

Compatibility

The code should work on any system that supports C17 and the uint64_t datatype, including MSb-first as bit numbering is expected. Big-endian and little-endian systems are cross-compatible, except when the decoded file contains only one byte type. The last requirement is a byte consisting of 8 bits.

Building/Installation

To compile the project, run make.
The Makefile needs to be modified for non linux systems, the resulting executable is in the same directory as the Makefile and is called huffman, to install it system wide run make install. To remove it, make uninstall. Use make debug for development , the compiled binary is slower, but includes address sanitiser and debug symbols.

Usage

$ huffman help
Encodes and decodes data using huffman algorithm.

Usage:
 huffman (encode|decode) [INFILE [OUTFILE]]
 huffman help

Note:
 - may be used for stdin / stdout
 When omitting INFILE/OUTFILE, stdin/stdout is used

Performance

Benchmark on a laptop with an nvme, data is randomly generated:

	encoding	decoding
1 KiB	0.004s	0.003s
1 MiB	0.020s	0.031s
100 MiB	2.018s	2.982s
1 GiB	10.767s	15.782s
10 GiB	61.474s	101.383s

Limitations

The maximum depth for the tree is hardcoded to 64. This paper shows that $F_{k+2}$ is the minimum number of symbols required to create a tree of depth $k$, where $F_n$ is the nth Fibonacci number.
To build a tree of depth 65 (which would fail), you'd need $F_{67}$ bytes. So this Huffman implementation should not fail for up to $F_{67}-1$ bytes, or about $44.94557021$ TiB.
There is another limit: the frequency per symbol. The frequency of each symbol is stored as uint64_t, so each symbol can occur at most $2^{64}-1$ times, which is about $1.844674407\cdot10^{19}$ or $16'777'216$ TiB.
The absolute limit that this Huffman implementation can handle is when each symbol frequency is maxed out, so $2^8\cdot2^{64}=2^{72}$, about $4'294'967'296$ TiB.

The file format

The file format has a simple structure, first the tree is decoded, then comes the encoded data, and the last three bits indicate the number of significant bits in the last byte.
The tree is stored as described here:

• Start at root
• go left, write 0
  • If leaf, write 1, then symbol, continue
  • If not leaf, repeat this step
• go right, write 0
  • If leaf, write 1, then symbol, continue
  • If not leaf, repeat this step

There is a special case when only one type of symbol is encoded, e.g. "AAA". Then the first bit is 1, the second byte is the symbol to decode and the following 8 bytes are the frequency of the symbol as uint64_t. Only this scenario isn't cross-compatible between little-endian and big-endian.