If you have a project you’re working on which has memory constraints, you’ll probably consider data compression to some degree or another at some point in development. Memory constraints are usually due to limitations of hardware on your target system/architecture; for reasons, you’re probably looking at anything from cache sizes, to stack memory, or physical memory.

With my rover project, my constraint was stack memory. Developing a recursive algorithm you can easily run out of space, so it becomes almost a base requirement to compress your data.