[kazinator]

Additional datapoints:

Tne Zopfli gzip-compatible compressor gets the file down to 54343. But zstd with level -19 beats that:

  -rw-rw-r-- 1 kaz kaz 54373 Jul  8 22:59 compiler.tlo.zopfli
  -rw-rw-r-- 1 kaz kaz 50102 Jul  8 17:43 compiler.tlo.zstd.19

I have no idea which is more CPU/memory intensive.

For applications in which compression speed is not important (data is being prepared once to be decompressed many times), if you want the best compression and stick with gzip, Zopfli is the ticket.

[attentive]

Try lzip. It's about 10 times faster than zopfli though it's not gzip compatible. And it beats zstd -19 on compression.