Memory-efficient way of opening large files in Emacs read-only

[Mikhail Pomaznoy <mikpom@mikpom.ru>]

Greetings!

In my daily workflows I commonly stumble upon a task of peeking into a 
header of a large (sometimes compressed) file. Those files can commonly 
be gigabytes in compressed form so can't fit into memory. I was 
wondering how can this be done in Emacs to leverage its search and 
navigate capabilities?

In a terminal this task is nicely accomplished with `less`, which loads 
file on demand while you scroll (memory-efficiently) and automatically 
detects at least gzip compression. However I am struggling to do 
something similar in Emacs for quite a long time.  I tried VLF (requires 
manually switching chunks loaded, encountered problems with 
compression), view-file (loads everything in memory), running less in 
Emacs terminals (I prefer outside-Emacs terminals) but for various 
reasons all this solutions are suboptimal and I usually end up with 
using `less`.

Is there something in Emacs I am missing? Is something like this makes 
sense to develop (I consider to write something for Emacs) ? I am using 
Emacs 28 and maybe in Emacs 29 there are novelties related to this issue?

Kind regards,

Mikhail