Support for compressed data

[kuwisdelu]

Can we add support for compressed data?

Although most compression like zlib don't support random access (which we need), there is the option of compressing vector elements of a list (or rows/columns of a matrix).

Adding zlib support at the C++ level would be quite a refactoring task. We would need to add additional metadata to atoms to support both the compressed length and the uncompressed length (versus the single extent we currently have). This would also require zlib.h available on target systems, but this is less of an issue than the development time.