EWAH is a word-aligned compressed variant of a bitset (i.e. a data
structure that acts as a 0-indexed boolean array for many entries).
It uses a 64-bit run-length encoding (RLE) compression scheme,
trading some compression for better processing speed.
The goal of this word-aligned implementation is not to achieve
the best compression, but rather to improve query processing time.
As it stands right now, this EWAH implementation will always be more
efficient storage-wise than its uncompressed alternative.
EWAH arrays will be used as the on-disk format to store reachability
bitmaps for all objects in a repository while keeping reasonable sizes,
in the same way that JGit does.
This EWAH implementation is a mostly straightforward port of the
original `javaewah` library that JGit currently uses. The library is
self-contained and has been embedded whole (4 files) inside the `ewah`
folder to ease redistribution.
The library is re-licensed under the GPLv2 with the permission of Daniel
Lemire, the original author. The source code for the C version can
be found on GitHub:
https://github.com/vmg/libewok
The original Java implementation can also be found on GitHub:
https://github.com/lemire/javaewah
[jc: stripped debug-only code per Peff's $gmane/239768]
Signed-off-by: Vicent Marti <tanoku@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Helped-by: Ramsay Jones <ramsay@ramsay1.demon.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
