{"slug": "mojo-deflate-vs-c", "title": "Mojo Deflate vs. C", "summary": "A Mojo implementation of DEFLATE, built with Claude's assistance, narrowly outperformed libdeflate, the C library described as the performance benchmark for the compression format. The author, who also had Claude build a mutation tester for Mojo called despell, reported that Claude used Mojo's comptime feature for minor optimizations to edge ahead, and noted the same tricks could be implemented in C but would be more cumbersome. The result, published in the mojo-deflate repository, follows Richard Feldman's post on how close pure functional programming can get to C performance.", "body_md": "# Mojo deflate vs C\n\nI read Richard Feldman’s post [How close can pure FP get to C?](https://rtfeldman.com/fp-vs-c), and this quote caught my attention:\n\nHowever, the [article](https://kim-em.github.io/blog/2026-7-24-why-lean-is-faster-than-rust/) also notes that while they managed to surpass Rust’s miniz_oxide, they were no match for the end boss of DEFLATE performance: libdeflate, written in C.\n\nI’ve been playing around with [Mojo](https://mojolang.org/), and I wondered how close to C performance we could get, so I sent Claude on it. Along the way I had Claude build a mutation tester for Mojo that I named [despell](https://github.com/boxed/despell).\n\nAll in all, [the Mojo version](https://github.com/boxed/mojo-deflate) managed to beat libdeflate, if only by a narrow margin. Claude found some minor tricks it could employ very easily with Mojo’s `comptime` feature to edge ahead. As Claude also said, this could all be implemented in the C version too, it’s just a bit more cumbersome.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mojo-deflate-vs-c", "canonical_source": "https://kodare.net/2026/10/26/mojo-deflate.html", "published_at": "2026-10-26 06:17:28+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-26 06:44:05.495610+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-tools", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["Mojo", "libdeflate", "Claude", "Richard Feldman", "despell", "mojo-deflate", "miniz_oxide", "C"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mojo-deflate-vs-c", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mojo-deflate-vs-c.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mojo-deflate-vs-c.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/mojo-deflate-vs-c.jsonld"}}