<!-- doxy
\page refUtilitiesrANS Entropy Coding Library
/doxy -->

# rANS Entropy Coding Library

[Aymmetric Numeral Systems](https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.2540) coders (ANS) are a new approach to entropy coding that allow close to entropy compression at high bandwidths. This is a custom implementation of rANS, one of the variants of ANS that copes well with large alphabets. An evaluation of rANS for ALICE can be found [here](https://indico.cern.ch/event/773049/contributions/3474364/attachments/1936180/3208584/Layout.pdf) 

The rANS public API is at an early stage and will be evolving over time. Currently the unittests can be used as a reference. 
