Compression codecs in pure Zig: Snappy, DEFLATE, gzip, zlib, Zstandard, and Brotli.

compress is one Zig module with a namespace per codec. The caller owns every buffer, and the default APIs do not allocate: zstd's streaming *Alloc variants are the opt-in that takes an allocator, for buffers too large for a stack. Streaming goes through std.Io. The module imports only std and fastmem.

What is in it

Namespace	Format	Support
snappy	Snappy blocks	encode, decode, streaming
flate	raw DEFLATE, RFC 1951	encode, decode, streaming, preset dictionary
gzip	gzip, RFC 1952, over flate	encode, decode, streaming
zlib	zlib, RFC 1950, over flate	encode, decode, streaming, preset dictionary
zstd	Zstandard, RFC 8878	encode (levels 1, 3), decode, streaming, dictionaries
brotli	Brotli, RFC 7932	encode (quality 3), decode, streaming

Not implemented:

• A zstd dictionary trainer: the zstd CLI trains dictionaries, and this package consumes them.

Install

zig fetch --save https://baskingspot.dev/compress/v0.2.0.tar.gz

Add the module to your build:

const compress = b.dependency("compress", .{ .target = target, .optimize = optimize });
exe.root_module.addImport("compress", compress.module("compress"));

Then import a codec:

const gzip = @import("compress").gzip;

std has a std.compress of its own. In a file that uses both, bind this module as compressx.

compress builds with Zig 0.16 only.

Documentation

• The guide says which codec to use for a task, with examples that compile.
• The API reference documents every symbol.
• examples/ has a command-line tool for each codec.
• Each codec's README documents its API, error sets, and buffer sizes. The specs are vendored in docs/specs/.

Work on it

nix develop   # Zig 0.16, zls, ziglint, zigdoc, and the rest
just ci       # unit tests, lint, and the cross-target compile gate
just fuzz     # fuzz every codec's targets, 10M iterations each by default
just bench    # local benchmarks
just wasm-demo # build and serve the browser demo

just lists every recipe. Numbers from just bench are local and are not claims. Comparisons with other libraries are measured on EC2 by the harness in bench/, which describes the grid and the method.

License

MIT. See LICENSE. Ports and vendored artifacts are listed in THIRD_PARTY.md. The logo files in docs/static/ are baskingspot marks and are not covered by it. See docs/static/LICENSE.

How it's made

Built with LLM assistance. How, in detail.