I shipped gni-compression to npm two days ago. One of the first questions I got (from myself, running benchmarks at midnight): does it work on anything other than chat data? Short answer: not yet. Long answer: I found out exactly why, and it led me somewhere more interesting than I expected. After the npm launch I ran GN against Silesia — the standard general text compression benchmark suite. Dick
There's a moment every developer knows. You need to generate a PDF. It looks simple. You've done harder things. Three hours later, you're reading a Stack Overflow thread from 2016 that ends with "works on my machine." This post is about that moment — the actual options, what breaks in each, and where I landed after years of hitting this in production. It uses a stripped-down WebKit engine and conv