Announcing Zstandard in Rust
8 hours ago
- #compression
- #rust
- #open-source
- Announcement of the first release of libzstd-rs-sys, a Rust implementation of the Zstandard compression format.
- Zstd is faster and compresses better than gzip, designed for modern CPUs, and expected to gradually replace gzip for web traffic.
- Advantages include portability (no C toolchain needed), acting as a drop-in replacement for the C reference implementation, and strengthening the open-source ecosystem with an independent implementation.
- Current state: decompression and dictionary builder cleanup completed; tested with reference implementation's test suite, fuzz testing, and Miri.
- Performance: default decompression is ~3% slower than C, but matches it with the unsafe-performance-experimental feature flag at the cost of memory safety.
- Future: seeking funding for compression portion; remaining work listed in Milestone 4: Encoder implementation.
- Ecosystem integration: fork of zstd using libzstd-rs-sys; plans for upstream integration.
- Acknowledgments to sponsors: Chainguard, Astral, NLnet Foundation, and Sovereign Tech Agency.
- Trifecta Tech Foundation is a non-profit creating open-source building blocks for critical infrastructure software.