Zstandard is a fast compression algorithm, providing high compression ratios. It’s a C library, and a command line utility producing and decoding .zst, .gz, .xz and .lz4 files.
It also offers a special mode for small data, called dictionary compression. The reference library offers a very wide range of speed / compression trade-off, and is backed by an extremely fast decoder.
Zstandard is free and open source software.
Features include:
- Parallel (multi-threaded) implementations of both compression and decompression.
- Adaptive” (–adapt) mode that varies compression level depending on I/O conditions, mainly how fast it can write the output.
- Trade compression speed for stronger compression ratios. It is configurable by small increment. Decompression speed is preserved and remain roughly the same at all settings, a property shared by most LZ compression algorithms.
- Use a user-provided compression dictionary.
- Training mode, which can be used to tune the algorithm for a selected type of data. Training Zstandard is achieved by provide it with a few samples (one file per sample). The result of this training is stored in a file called “dictionary”, which must be loaded before compression and decompression. Using this dictionary, the compression ratio achievable on small data improves dramatically.
- Rich API set.
Website: facebook.github.io/zstd
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Facebook, Inc.
License: Dual BSD and GNU General Public License Version 2
Zstandard is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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