bsdiff

Courgette isn't BSDiff, it is Google's replacement for/improvement upon BSDiff.

This is why programs like bsdiff and courgette exist, because comparing binaries is actually an enormously non-trivial problem.

There are things, like bsdiff, that allow you to download and patch only tiny differences related to a security flaw.

Game assets don't change in the ways that compiled binaries do, so bsdiff doesn't sound like it would be appropriate.

Although cperciva pointed out [1] that this is probably due to a bug in bsdiff.

Suffix arrays are useful for approximate matches too-- they're used by the binary delta program BSDiff[1] to match similar code sequences.

I got an email like this a couple of years ago -- apparently someone liked my work on bsdiff.

They were using BSDiff for Chrome updates before they switched to Courgette.

BSDiff is used in Google products (Including Chrome)[2] and Firefox's delta updates.

According to sloccount, bsdiff + bspatch is 425 lines of code.

Firefox already uses bsdiff to generate binary diffs for update distribution.

Re-reading the bsdiff paper, it's pretty tailored to executable file formats.