fabiochelly
26th February 2004 16:59 UTC

A new encoding pass in the latest innosetup
Innosetup seems to be able to compress exe files better using this method as they describe it in they "what's new" file:

Executable files are now compressed even better, thanks to a new encoding/decoding pass that optimizes x86 JMP & CALL instructions.

Joost Verburg
26th February 2004 17:10 UTC

Yes, that is BCJ. This feature has been requested before and is already on the request list.

mlaan
27th February 2004 00:06 UTC

Actually, it's not BCJ but a similar custom algorithm. Interesting to realize though that until NSIS has something like this, some Inno Setup installers might actually be *smaller* than NSIS installers ;)

Joost Verburg
27th February 2004 12:02 UTC

All these algorithms work quite similar, it gives you a little better results on compressed x86-32 executables. BCJ2 is even better, but that requires mutliple threads.

Depening on your data, it usually saves some kilobytes, but before you compensate a > 200 KB overhead difference your installer is probably quite large so the overhead is not really important anymore.

Anyway, it's still a nice feature, so hopefully someone will find time to integrate it soon :)