Yes, bgzf can be much faster in practice. Both because the underlying gzip implementation can be simplified (see e.g. libdeflate), and because it can be more ef

Yes, bgzf can be much faster in practice. Both because the underlying gzip implementation can be simplified (see e.g. libdeflate), and because it can be more effectively parallelised. It doesn't matter if it's IO-bound of course, but compression rarely is.