JuliaLang/julia — pull request #1206 by kmsquire (2012-08-24 12:33:37+00:00)
Title: Initial zlib uncompress, compress support.  Based partially on #553.

RIght now, this only includes compress and uncompress functions. These are a "high-level" interface in zlib. @choffstein had originally started writing a wrapper in C around these functions, but it turns out they are easily callable directly from Julia. Lower level C functions offering more control of the compression/decompression process are available, but require passing of structs, and therefore may be more challenging to interact with without a C wrapper.

I've exposed a number of zlib.h internal constants. Most of these are not used by compress/uncompress and related functions. Some are used by the gzip related functions, and some are used by lower-level functions that I'm not planning to implement right now (though someone else should feel free to if they have a need). I do have julia wrapper functions for almost all of the gzip file functions, along with an IOStream-like interface. I'll send a pull request for that once this gets through comments (or package it separately in its own repo).

Question of the day: this depends on zlib, another C library. It's a pretty core library in many places, but is it something you want as part of the main distribution, or should it be put into a separate module?

Kevin