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by m0zg 1675 days 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.
2 comments
nigeltao 1675 days 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-deco...

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mjevans 1675 days 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?

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m0zg 1675 days 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.
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diroussel 1675 days ago
Four letter extensions work really well for .java and .json. It seems strange the abbreviate zstd anymore.
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m0zg 1675 days ago
I'like to point out though that "zstd" is itself an abbreviation, and "zstandard" would be quite onerous.
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