I built a benchmark harness for exploring compression of Lua script source files embedded in a Lua app binary as individual static constant C arrays. I settled on gzip, specifically deflate/inflate. Deflate does as well or better for small source files compared to xz, bzip2, and zstd. More importantly, the inflate algorithm is tiny[1]; embedding the zstd decompressor blew up the binary.

I also explored building precomputed dictionaries, which means you can easily embed the files individually (which simplifies compilation and loading through the Lua C API) while getting similar compression ratios as when compressing an enormous file (e.g. a concatenation of all the source files). This is trivial with the zstd reference utility. It's also simple for deflate, though you have to roll your own dictionary builder by hacking the implementation. But I never bothered implementing it beyond the benchmark harness. I probably would have stuck with deflate rather than switching to zstd just because the compiled inflate implementation is so small.

[1] https://github.com/madler/zlib/blob/develop/contrib/puff/puf...

> 125 KB of disk space on a diskette.

> I use SI prefixes for bytes. You should too!

The prefix for 1000 is lowercase.

interesting! have you tried putting the compressed payload into a large block comment at the end/start of the file, and recovering it by loading your own source as bytes to prevent the compiler from mangling the payload? I'm not sure if that would work but could be worth a try...