On my system, the gzip binary is 100KB and my zstd binary is 1.0MB. There are a number of reasons for this: - By default, the Zstd binary has a lot of addition

On my system, the gzip binary is 100KB and my zstd binary is 1.0MB. There are a number of reasons for this: - By default, the Zstd binary has a lot of additional functionality that gzip doesn't. For example: Zstd includes benchmarking capabilities, the ability to train compression dictionaries, support for legacy (pre-1.0) formats, etc. You can strip all that stuff out with compile flags, and the binary gets a lot smaller. - Zstandard tries to cover a much wider range of compression speeds than zlib does. To do this, the Zstd compressor actually has eight or so different LZ match-finding implementations under the hood (which get inlined in various ways, resulting in >100 actual versions in the binary), and 5+ different entropy encoding implementations. For really size-conscious use-cases (like decompressing Zstd content in a mobile app), you can get a minimal Zstd decompressor library down to ~30KB.