================================ Announcing python-blosc 1.1 RC1 ================================ What is it? =========== python-blosc (http://blosc.pydata.org/) is a Python wrapper for the Blosc compression library. Blosc (http://blosc.org) is a high performance compressor optimized for binary data. It has been designed to transmit data to the processor cache faster than the traditional, non-compressed, direct memory fetch approach via a memcpy() OS call. Whether this is achieved or not depends of the data compressibility, the number of cores in the system, and other factors. See a series of benchmarks conducted for many different systems: http://blosc.org/trac/wiki/SyntheticBenchmarks. Blosc works well for compressing numerical arrays that contains data with relatively low entropy, like sparse data, time series, grids with regular-spaced values, etc. There is also a handy command line for Blosc called Bloscpack (https://github.com/esc/bloscpack) that allows you to compress large binary datafiles on-disk. Although the format for Bloscpack has not stabilized yet, it allows you to effectively use Blosc from your favorite shell. What is new? ============ - Added new `compress_ptr` and `decompress_ptr` functions that allows to compress and decompress from/to a data pointer. These are low level calls and user must make sure that the pointer data area is safe. - Since Blosc (the C library) already supports to be installed as an standalone library (via cmake), it is also possible to link python-blosc against a system Blosc library. - The Python calls to Blosc are now thread-safe (another consequence of recent Blosc library supporting this at C level). - Many checks on types and ranges of values have been added. Most of the calls will now complain when passed the wrong values. - Docstrings are much improved. Also, Sphinx-based docs are available now. Many thanks to Valentin Hänel for his impressive work for this release. For more info, you can see the release notes in: https://github.com/FrancescAlted/python-blosc/wiki/Release-notes More docs and examples are available in the documentation site: http://blosc.pydata.org Installing ========== python-blosc is in PyPI repository, so installing it is easy: $ pip install -U blosc # yes, you should omit the blosc- prefix Download sources ================ The sources are managed through github services at: http://github.com/FrancescAlted/python-blosc Documentation ============= There is Sphinx-based documentation site at: http://blosc.pydata.org/ Mailing list ============ There is an official mailing list for Blosc at: blosc@googlegroups.com http://groups.google.es/group/blosc Licenses ======== Both Blosc and its Python wrapper are distributed using the MIT license. See: https://github.com/FrancescAlted/python-blosc/blob/master/LICENSES for more details. -- Francesc Alted