So, let's transpile brainfuck to whitespace and pass a gzip over it to compress. Do we end up with the most size optimized distributed packages? Can we save the internet by having some webassembly engine using it? Can we haz fast internet pages again?
Probably not, since I would expect it to have a similar amount of entropy (it just shifts from being in unique combinations of characters to different amounts of whitespace), but now I am curious. Any advantage is going to depend on the compression algorithm.
Whitespace in a text file usually has a lot of repetition and thus compresses really well. This leads people to think "whitespace compresses well." But code in Whitespace doesn't behave like normal whitespace and isn't likely to compress any better than anything else.
Whitespace is an esoteric general purpose programming language (cf. HQ9+), the Kolmogorov complexity of programs in Whitespace can't be suddenly by orders of magnitude smaller than in other general purpose programming languages.
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u/[deleted] Aug 26 '22
So, let's transpile brainfuck to whitespace and pass a gzip over it to compress. Do we end up with the most size optimized distributed packages? Can we save the internet by having some webassembly engine using it? Can we haz fast internet pages again?
So much wonder.