this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Programmer Humor

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[–] joyjoy@lemm.ee 100 points 1 year ago (15 children)

There are 3 types of files. Renamed txt, renamed zip, and exe

[–] Toribor@corndog.social 53 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I'd argue with this, but it seems like image and video file extensions have become a lawless zone with no rules so I don't even think they count.

[–] Hauskrampf@ttrpg.network 30 points 1 year ago

Looking at you, .webp

[–] gamma@programming.dev 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Video files are just a bunch of zip files in a trenchcoat.

[–] fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Back in the day, when bandwidth was precious and porn sites would parcel a video into 10 second extracts, one per page, you could zip a bunch of these mpeg files together into an uncompressed zip, then rename it .mpeg and read it in VLC as a single video. Amazing stuff.

[–] gazter@aussie.zone 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What's it called when you logically expect something to work, but are totally surprised that it actually does?

[–] fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

Sounds an awful lot like a normal day at work as a dev.

[–] cultpony@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] GlitchyDigiBun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's a folder that you put files into, but acts as a file itself. Not at all like zip.

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[–] lemann@lemmy.one 88 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Ah, good ol' Microsoft Office. Taken advantage of their documents being a renamed .zip format to send forbidden attachments to myself via email lol

On the flip side, there's stuff like the Audacity app, that saves each audio project as an SQLite database 😳

[–] Hexagon@feddit.it 50 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Also .jar files. And good ol' winamp skins. And CBZ comics. And EPUB books. And Mozilla extensions. And APK apps. And...

[–] neo@lemmy.comfysnug.space 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

cbz is literally just a renamed zip

[–] MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Btw, you can create "chapters" by creating folders. Easy to automate with a loop.

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[–] beeb@lemm.ee 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

an SQLite database

Genius! Why bother importing and exporting

[–] xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Minetest (an open-source Minecraft-like game) uses SQLite to save worlds.

[–] lemann@lemmy.one 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mineclone2 is an absolute masterpiece of a game for Minetest IMO

[–] xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 1 year ago

I prefer games that embrace the difference from Minecraft instead of trying to emulate it. My favorite is MeseCraft.

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[–] tsonfeir@lemm.ee 23 points 1 year ago

SQLite is amazing. Shush.

[–] mogoh@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

that saves each audio project as an SQLite database 😳

Is this a problem? I thought this would be a normal use case for SQLite.

[–] fiah@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

doesn't sqlite explicitly encourage this? I recall claims about storing blobs in a sqlite db having better performance than trying to do your own file operations

[–] MNByChoice@midwest.social 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thanks for the hint. I had to look that up. (The linked page is worth a read and has lots of details and caveats.)

The scope is narrow, and well documented. Be very wary of over generalizing.

The measurements in this article were made during the week of 2017-06-05 using a version of SQLite in between 3.19.2 and 3.20.0. You may expect future versions of SQLite to perform even better.

https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html

SQLite reads and writes small blobs (for example, thumbnail images) 35% faster¹ than the same blobs can be read from or written to individual files on disk using fread() or fwrite().

Furthermore, a single SQLite database holding 10-kilobyte blobs uses about 20% less disk space than storing the blobs in individual files.)

Edit 5: consolidated my edits.

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[–] space@lemmy.dbzer0.com 64 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Also renamed xml, renamed json and renamed sqlite.

[–] TrustingZebra@lemmy.one 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Those sound fancy, I just use renamed txt files.

[–] neo@lemmy.comfysnug.space 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 9 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Amateurs.

I have evolved from using file extensions, and instead, don't use any extension!

[–] H4mi@lemm.ee 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t even use a file system on my storage drives. I just write the file contents raw and try to memorize where.

[–] ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Sounds tedious, I've just been keeping everything in memory so I don't have to worry about where it is.

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[–] dan@upvote.au 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

SQLite explicitly encourages using it as an on-disk binary format. The format is well-documented and well-supported, backwards compatible (there's been no major version changes since 2004), and the developers have promised to support it at least until the year 2050. It has quick seek times if your data is properly indexed, the SQLite library is distributed as a single C file that you can embed directly into your app, and it's probably the most tested library in the world, with something like 500x more test code than library code.

Unless you're a developer that really understands the intricacies of designing a binary data storage format, it's usually far better to just use SQLite.

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[–] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 40 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nothing wrong with that... Most people don't need to reinvent the wheel, and choosing a filename extension meaningful to the particular use case is better then leaving it as .zip or .db or whatever.

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

Totally depends on what the use case is. The biggest problem is that you basically always have to compress and uncompress the file when transferring it. It makes for a good storage format, but a bad format for passing around in ways that need to be constantly read and written.

Plus often we're talking plain text files being zipped and those plain text formats need to be parsed as well. I've written code for systems where we had to do annoying migrations because the serialized format is just so inefficient that it adds up eventually.

[–] AI_toothbrush@lemmy.zip 23 points 1 year ago

When i discovered as a little kid that apk files are actually zips i felt like a detective.

[–] HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] gamma@programming.dev 13 points 1 year ago (9 children)
[–] dan@upvote.au 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

They both have their use cases. Zstandard is for compression of a stream of data (or a single file), while 7-Zip is actually two parts: A directory structure (like tar) plus a compression algorithm (like LZMA which it uses by default) in a single app.

7-Zip is actually adding zstd support: https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/feature-requests/1580/

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