A curious fact I encountered: First, the zstdcat executable that ships with zstd (actually a symlink to zstd itself, roughly equivalent to "zstd -cqdf") can dec

A curious fact I encountered: First, the zstdcat executable that ships with zstd (actually a symlink to zstd itself, roughly equivalent to "zstd -cqdf") can decompress .gz files. Second, zstd is faster than gzip at decompressing .gz files, taking about 2/3 as long. I'm not kidding. I couldn't believe it myself, but subsequent testing stubbornly bore it out—on one file that was 15 MB after compression, and on a mix of smaller files. I tried compiling gzip from source, using the same compiler I used for zstd, and the results were the same. strace seemed to show zstd read and wrote in chunks 2x the size, but the number of syscalls didn't seem to be nearly enough to explain the difference. It seems to have this "zlibWrapper" subdirectory; its README has some benchmark numbers that I don't fully understand, but some of them seem to match the 2/3 factor I got. I'm wondering if this is a clever tactic to drive adoption—get people to use the zstd executable even when they're still using gzipped files. ;-) Also, the fact that it has support for reading (and, apparently, writing) gzip, lz4, and xz on top of its own format really makes "z standard" an appropriate name.