It includes the above patches as well as few QoL features.
Hence why PeaZip is so popular, and J-Zip used to be before it was stuffed with adware.
Granted Windows 11 has started doing the same for its zip and 7zip compressors.
Same trick goes for opening archives or executables (Installers) as archives.
Since you're asking, the answer is no. 7-Zip has an efficient and elegant UI.
The author updates code in the github repo....by drag and drop file uploads. https://github.com/peazip/PeaZip/commits/sources/
Desktop software usability peaked sometime in the late 90s, early 2000s. There's a reason why 7zip still looks like ~2004
On Linux bsdtar/libarchive gives a similar experience: "tar xf file" works on most things.
But for sharing files with other people, ZIP is still king. Even 7z or RAR is niche. Everyone can open a ZIP file, and they don't really care if the file is a few MBs bigger.
You can use ZSTD with ZIP files too! It's compression method 93 (see https://pkware.cachefly.net/webdocs/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT which is the official ZIP file specification).
Which reveals that "everyone can open a ZIP file" is a lie. Sure, everyone can open a ZIP file, as long as that file uses only a limited subset of the ZIP format features. Which is why formats which use ZIP as a base (Java JAR files, OpenDocument files, new Office files) standardize such a subset; but for general-purpose ZIP files, there's no such standard.
(I have encountered such ZIP files in the wild; "unzip" can't decompress them, though p7zip worked for these particular ZIP files.)
if you cant open it, well.. then stop using 90ies winzip
How about software developers learn to keep software working on old OSes and old hardware?
Installing new software has a real time and hassle cost, and how much time are you actually saving over the long run? It depends on your usage patterns.
I know what you mean, I’m not being pedantic, but I just realized it’s been 19 years. I wonder when we’ll start calling them “Office files”.
Probably around the same time the save icon becomes something other than a 3 1/2" floppy disk.
Mostly it seems nutty that, after all these years, they’re still updating the zip spec instead of moving on to a newer format.
Some things are used for interoperability, and switching to a newer incompatible thing loses all of its value.
Interestingly, I think if you examine the errors in the analogy you made, you’ll better understand why simply spinning off a highly tweaked zip format into its own thing with its own file extension might make more sense than stretching the existing format and hoping everyone adopts the most recent changes.
Support for which was added in 2020:
> On 15 June 2020, Zstandard was implemented in version 6.3.8 of the zip file format with codec number 93, deprecating the previous codec number of 20 as it was implemented in version 6.3.7, released on 1 June.[36][37]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zstd#Usage
So I'm not sure how widely deployed it would be.
They are not regarded kindly.
People also tend to care about how much time they spend on compression for each incremental % of compression performance and zstd tends to be a Pareto frontier for that (at least for open source algorithms)
Unfortunately for the hoster, they either have to eat the cost of the added bandwidth from a larger file or have people complain about slow decompression.
I don't know what your use case is, but it seems to be quite a niche.
Even on latest Windows 11 takes minutes to do what 7-Zip does in seconds.
Goes to show how good all those leetcode interviews turn out.
on anything else - either directly zstd or tar
It's not going anywhere anytime soon.
The more likely thing to eat into its relevance is now that Windows has built-in basic support for zipping/unzipping EDIT: other formats*, which relegates 7-zip to more niche uses.
That makes it 'good enough' for the vast majority of people, even if it's not as fast or fully-featured as 7-Zip.
That allows it to be a default that 'just works' for most people without installing anything extra.
The vast majority of users don't care about the extra performance or functionality of a tool like 7-zip. They just need a way to open and send files and the Windows built-in tool is 'good enough' for them.
TortoiseGit (and TortoiseSVN) are similarly convenient. Right click a folder with an SVN repo checked out, and select "SVN update". Right-click an empty space, and select "SVN checkout". SVN was the main distribution method for some modding communities before things like Steam Workshop and Github, specifically because TortoiseSVN made it so convenient. Checkout into your addons folder, and periodically update. What could be simpler?
Posting this link to hn has consumed more human potential than the thing it is describing will save up to the end of time.
You just termux qemu-utils convert your qcow2 partitions to IMG and 7zip can read IMG file
Try yourself to see you can extract from your emulated windows
avidiax•9h ago
lmm•9h ago
lofties•9h ago
dwattttt•8h ago
> Applications that do not call any functions that use processor affinity masks or processor numbers will operate correctly on all systems, regardless of the number of processors.
I suspect the limitation 7zip encountered was in how it checked how many logical processors a system has, to determine how many threads to spawn. GetActiveProcessorCount can tell you how many logical processors are on the system if you pass ALL_PROCESSOR_GROUPS, but that API was only added in Windows 7 (that said, that was more than 15 years ago, they probably could've found a moment to add and test a conditional call to it).
dspillett•8h ago
"If there are more than one processor group in Windows (on systems with more than 64 cpu threads), 7-Zip distributes running CPU threads across different processor groups."
The OS does not do that for you under Windows. Other OSs handle that many cores differently.
> more than 15 years ago, they probably could've found a moment to add and test a conditional call to it
I suspect it hasn't been an issue much at all until recently. Any single block of data worth spinning up that many threads for compressing is going to be very large, you don't want to split something into too small chunks for compression or you lose some benefit of the dynamic compression dictionary (sharing that between threads would add a lot of inter-thread coordination work, killing any performance gain even if the threads are running local enough on the CPU to share cache). Compression is not an inherently parallelizable task, at least not “embarrassingly” so like some processes.
Even when you do have something to compress that would benefit for more than 64 separate tasks in theory, unless it is all in RAM (or on an incredibly quick & low latency drive/array) the process is likely to be IO starved long before it is compute starved, when you have that much compute resource to hand.
Recent improvements in storage options & CPUs (and the bandwidth between them) have presumably pushed the occurrences of this being worthwhile (outside of artificial tests) from “practically zero” to “near zero, but it happens”, hence the change has been made.
Note that two or more 7-zip instances working on different data could always use more than 64 threads between them, if enough cores to make that useful were available.
dwattttt•6h ago
The referenced text suggests applications will "work", but that isn't really explicit.
Dylan16807•6h ago
> starting with Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022 the OS has changed to make processes and their threads span all processors in the system, across all processor groups, by default.
> Each process is assigned a primary group at creation, and by default all of its threads' primary group is the same. Each thread's ideal processor is in the thread's primary group, so threads will preferentially be scheduled to processors on their primary group, but they are able to be scheduled to processors on any other group.
monocasa•3h ago
The difference is just that processes will be assigned a processor group more or less randomly by default, so they'll be balanced on the process level, but not the thread level. Not super helpful for a lot of software systems on windows which had historically preferred threads to processes for concurrency.
Dylan16807•3h ago
No it won't.
monocasa•3h ago
That's literally why 7-zip is announcing completion of that manual work.
Dylan16807•2h ago
It also needed to change if you want optimal scheduling, and it needed to change if you want it to be able to use all those cores on something that isn't windows 11.
But for just the basic functionality of using all the cores: >Starting with Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022, on a system with more than 64 processors, process and thread affinities span all processors in the system, across all processor groups, by default
That's documentation for a single process messing with its affinity. They're not writing that because they wrote a function to put different processes on different groups. A single process will span groups by default.
Dylan16807•6h ago
silon42•8h ago
An ugly limitation on an API that initially looks superior to Linux equivalents.
monocasa•8h ago
Because of that, transitioning a software thread to another processor group is a manual process that has to be managed by user space.
zik•5h ago
Const-me•4h ago
The technical decision Microsoft made initially worked well for over two decades. I don’t think it was lame; I believe it was a solid choice back then.
monocasa•4h ago
And x86 arguably didn't ship >64 hardware thread systems until then because NT didn't support it.
Const-me•4h ago
Windows didn’t run on these other systems, why would Microsoft care about them?
> x86 arguably didn't ship >64 hardware thread systems until then because NT didn't support it
For publicly accessible web servers, Linux overtook Windows around 2005. Then in 2006 Amazon launched EC2, and the industry started that massive transition to the clouds. Linux is better suited for clouds, due to OS licensing and other reasons.
monocasa•4h ago
Because it was clear that high core count, single system image platforms were a viable server architecture, and NT was vying for the entire server space, intending to kill off the vendor Unices.
. For publicly accessible web servers, Linux overtook Windows around 2005. Then in 2006 Amazon launched EC2, and the industry started that massive transition to the clouds. Linux is better suited for clouds, due to OS licensing and other reasons.
Linux wasn't the only OS. Solaris and AIX were NT's competitors too back then, and supported higher core counts.
rsynnott•2h ago
p_ing•1h ago
That doesn't mean every platform was or would have been profitable. x86 became 'good enough' to run your mail or web server, it doomed other architectures (and commonly OSes) as the cost of x86 was vastly lower than the Alphas, PowerPCs, and so on.
zamadatix•4h ago
If that were the case the above system wouldn't have needed 8 sockets. With NUMA systems the app needs to be scheduling group aware anyways. The difference here really appears when you have a single socket with more than 64 hardware threads, which took until ~2019 for x86.
monocasa•4h ago
I absolutely stand by the fact that Intel and AMD didn't pursue high core count systems until that point because they were so focused on single core perf, in part because Windows didn't support high core counts. The end of Denmark scing forced their hand and Microsoft's processor group hack.
zamadatix•4h ago
monocasa•3h ago
zamadatix•2h ago
5.0 (1999) - NUMA scheduling
6.1 (2009) - Processor Groups to have the KAFFINITY limit be per NUMA node
Xeon E7-8800 (2011) - An x86 system exceeding 64 total cores is possible (10x8 -> requires Processor Groups)
Epyc 9004 (2022) - KAFFINITY has created an artificial limit for x86 where you need to split groups more granular than NUMA
If x86 had actually hit a KAFFINITY wall then the E7-8800 even would have occured years before processor groups because >8 core CPUs are desirable regardless if you can stick 8 in a single box.
The story is really a bit reverse from the claim: NT in the 90s supported architectures which could scale past the KAFFINITY limit. NT in the late 2000s supported scaling x86 but it wouldn't have mattered until the 2010s. Ultimately KAFFINITY wasn't an annoyance until the 2020s.
elzbardico•3h ago
Single core performance is really important for client computing.
monocasa•3h ago
sidewndr46•2h ago
arp242•3h ago
Server systems were available with that since at least the late 90s. Server systems with >10 CPUs were already available in the mid-90s. By the early-to-mid 90s it was pretty obvious that was only going to increase and that the 64-CPU limit was going to be a problem down the line.
That said, development of NT started in 1988, and it may have been less obvious then.
immibis•2h ago
sidewndr46•2h ago
meepmorp•2h ago
rsynnott•2h ago
(Now, NT for Sparc never actually became a thing, but it was certainly on Microsoft's radar at one point)
whalesalad•1h ago
xxs•1h ago