6 ms·

Zstd is an amazing bit of work and all I ever use for data compression nowadays (or LZ4 when speed is even more critical). Several times the compression/decompr

by m0zg 5y ago

Zstd is an amazing bit of work and all I ever use for data compression nowadays (or LZ4 when speed is even more critical). Several times the compression/decompression speed of gzip, approximately the same compression ratio with default settings. It's also supported by tar in recent Linux distros, if zstd is installed, so "tar acf blah.tar.zst *" works fine, and "tar xf blah.tar.zst" works automatically as well. Give it a try, folks, and retire gzip shortly afterwards.

mjevans 5y ago
I get why someone might want to avoid .zstd ; but that is the short name offered for humans. Was .zs not sufficient if a file format ending in 'std' is so abhorrent?
- m0zg 5y ago
  I'm not the one who came up with the extension. It just sort of organically happened I guess. I'd prefer "zstd" myself, but, frankly, "zst" is fine as well.
  - diroussel 5y ago
    Four letter extensions work really well for .java and .json. It seems strange the abbreviate zstd anymore.
    - m0zg 5y ago
      I'like to point out though that "zstd" is itself an abbreviation, and "zstandard" would be quite onerous.
nigeltao 5y ago
> Several times the compression/decompression speed of gzip Just be careful that you're comparing against the best implementation of gzip. One recent re-implementation of zcat was 3.1x faster than /bin/zcat (and the CRC-32 implementation within was 7.3x faster than /bin/crc32). Both programs decode exactly the same file format. They're just different implementations. For details, see: https://nigeltao.github.io/blog/2021/fastest-safest-png-decoder.html#gzip https://nigeltao.github.io/blog/2021/fastest-safest-png-deco...