
After nearly 4 years, a bunch of bugfixes to zlib - inetknght
http://www.zlib.net/ChangeLog.txt
======
jftuga
I have moved on to xz. I know it is slower and uses more memory, but I like it
because it is multithreaded and compresses a lot better than gzip or bzip2.
The main XZ Utils web page also distributes Windows binaries. It is also built
into tar now.

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fmela
Facebook's ZStandard compression library appears to be both faster and better
at compressing than zlib. Is there any reason to continue using zlib for new
projects that don't need backward compatibility?

~~~
dguaraglia
Hm, not really, unless you care about being able to read the data from
anywhere else. Zlib, like any of the other "traditional" libraries out there,
is supported pretty much everywhere and has bindings for every language you
can think of. But that shouldn't drive your project.

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mappu
I work with a few projects that were badly impacted by correctness bugs in the
recent zlib 1.2.10 update and could no longer interoperate with older versions
of the software.

The update to 1.2.11 did resolve them.

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oso2k
Mark's a very busy guy at JPL (I'm a former JPLer myself). Making science
happen on Mars and whatnot.

zlib is super stable and that's largely its biggest benefit as opposed to when
it was originally released in the 90s. Back then, biggest benefit was that it
was not impeded by patents or licensing, and, it was faster (in general
purpose use) than any other compressors while providing the highest level of
compression (in general purpose use). Nowadays bzip2 and lzma (and others) can
provide better compression.

However, there's lots of choice in compressors (especially open sourced
compressors).

My favorite for symmetric compression/decompression speed is LZ4 [0] and
overall decompression speed over compression ratio. Decompression speed
approaches memory copy speed! You can use it for compressing your Linux kernel
[1], your ZFS file system [2], and your Linux zram driver [3]. lzo, miniz [4],
QuickLZ, LZF, Snappy are also quite speedy in different ways.

For compression ratio, it's lzham [5] that is most impressive. But pigz may be
more your style. Others may choose brotli, zstd, or others still.

[0] [https://github.com/lz4/lz4](https://github.com/lz4/lz4)

[1]
[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI4NjM](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI4NjM)

[2] [http://www.open-zfs.org/wiki/Features#lz4_compression](http://www.open-
zfs.org/wiki/Features#lz4_compression)

[3]
[https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.15#head-52af9ef123b7c0792b...](https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.15#head-52af9ef123b7c0792b09a1a0222fdc8c21ab5d4c)

[4] [https://github.com/richgel999/miniz](https://github.com/richgel999/miniz)

[5]
[https://github.com/richgel999/lzham_codec](https://github.com/richgel999/lzham_codec)

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BrailleHunting
zlib is one of those packages that's often the root of all packages.

(Were you expecting "evil?" That's only in packages distributed without
checking GPG signatures of sources verified by strong web-of-trust, built on
well-secured build farms and implementing end-to-end chain-of-custody for
distribution artifacts.)

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rurban
Still cannot be compiled with C++ (-Wc++-compat) We fixed those issues by
ourselves.

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saywatnow
no source repository? Looks like a great opportunity for someone to grab all
the release tarballs and build one to chuck on github. Bonus points for
putting changelog contents in the commit logs!

~~~
noselasd
Mark Adler, the maintainer, has it here
[https://github.com/madler/zlib](https://github.com/madler/zlib)

