This is not that post, sadly. This is about something else: namely, me only citing Jarek Duda’s work on ANS and not Yann Collet‘s work on FSE. Apparently, there were multiple versions of Jarek’s ANS paper, and the second version (which contains rANS, the topic I’ve been writing about) was significantly influenced by Yann’s experiences with integrating ideas from the first version into FSE.

Anyway, I did not mention Yann’s work in my rANS posts at all. I just want to make clear that this was because I was writing about rANS not tANS (the family that FSE is a member of), and I simply wasn’t aware that Yann’s work and input significantly influenced the second version of the ANS paper. My apologies; this was a simple oversight, not a deliberate attempt to talk down Yann’s contribution!

On a separate but related note: Mid-february, I wrote a short paper on how entropy coders (with a focus on ANS) can be interleaved on the encode side to allow the decoder side to exploit instruction-level parallelism and/or SIMD instructions. I originally meant to do a separate post about it here, but on trying to write it discovered that I didn’t have much to say on the topic that wasn’t in the paper. Hence, no separate blog post. But I figured I should at least link to it once from here.

Anyway, more regular blog updates should start again soon. Until then!