When can we bring this to the web? Zstd aka RFC8478[1] is so good. That it can continue to improve at all feels almost unbelievable, but @Cyan4973 &al continue to make it faster, somehow.<p>Especially on mobile, with large assets, I feel like zstd's lightning fast decompression time could be a huge win. It used to be that Brotli was the obvious choice for achieving high compression, but it doesn't feel so clear to me now. Here's one random run-off between the two[2].<p>The other obvious use case is if there is large-ish dynamic-ish data, where the cost of doing Brotli compression each time might be too high.<p>[1] <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8478" rel="nofollow">https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8478</a><p>[2] <a href="https://peazip.github.io/fast-compression-benchmark-brotli-zstandard.html" rel="nofollow">https://peazip.github.io/fast-compression-benchmark-brotli-z...</a>
Zstd is so much better than the commonly-used alternatives that I get mildly annoyed when given a .tar.{gz,xz,bz2} it's not like it's a huge deal, but a much smaller file (compared to gz) or similarly sized with much faster decompression (comared to xz, bz2) just makes me a tiny bit happier.
Is this the same "zstd" compression used in Fedora's btrfs transparent block level compression? I have been thoroughly impressed with it in Fedora 34. If that's true, I had no idea that it was a Facebook project. Color me shocked.
> Single file Libs
> This move reflects a commitment on our part to support this tool and this pattern of using zstd going forward.<p>I love that they are moving toward supporting an amalgamation build. I and many others reach for SQLite because of this feature, and I think this will really increase the adoption of Zstd.
Fun fact: when we started compressing our analytical events (furry JSON arrays with lots of context) we've dropped about 60% of our total inbound traffic. I was afraid that compression will eat client's battery, but we eventually got a reverse effect: saving energy on radio part, being WiFi or 4G/5G.
Good blog post on zstd: <a href="https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2017/03/07/better-compression-with-zstandard/" rel="nofollow">https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2017/03/07/better-compression-...</a>
zstd performance is great on <i>really old</i> and weak CPUs, at its default compression level. I recently tested it with a whole system file tree on a 2005 vintage Pentium M single core (thinkpad x41 tablet) running a bare bones debian install, and was pleasantly surprised.
zstandard continues to amazes me. Compared to zlib (level=4 I think) it seems to have best of both worlds (good speed & comparable compression ratio).