Hello everyone – For testing purposes, I'd like to have a reference gzip implementation on Windows. The last release of Gzip for Windows is 10 years old. (And I think Igor's gzipper included in 7-zip uses an improved DEFLATE, so it's not a good baseline gzip.)
The reference gzipper in a lot of benchmarks seems to be zlib. How do I compile zlib into a program on Windows 10? If I use the included project files in Visual Studio 2017, it compiles a program called minizip. I don't know what that is, but won't run anyway. When I try to run the .exe, it complains about needing another DLL. It's strange that the included project and solution files don't take care of this DLL. The docs are many years old, so I'm not sure how to proceed.
There is also GNU Gzip, which is a program for Unix-like OSes. Is there a way to compile the current release on Windows?
Bonus question: Do you expect zlib and GNU Gzip to yield different results in terms of compression ratio for gzip files? Relatedly, should newer versions of these programs give better compression ratios than older versions? I was wondering about that when I noticed that the "gzip" implementation that Matt Mahoney uses in his text compression benchmark is more than 14 years old. It's an old Gzip for Windows release, and I wonder if it might be understating gzip performance.
Anyway, any tips on how to compile zlib into a Windows executable that lets me choose levels 1-9? Or the same for GNU Gzip?