ZXC is a high-performance lossless compression library and command-line tool written primarily in C.
It’s designed for asymmetric workloads where data is compressed once but decompressed many times, making it suited to game assets, firmware updates, app bundles, content delivery pipelines, and other read-heavy use cases. The project focuses on very fast decompression, configurable compression levels, seekable archives, and integration from C, Rust, Python, Node.js, Go, and WebAssembly.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Provides a C library and command-line tool for lossless compression and decompression.
- Optimized for write-once/read-many workloads where decode speed matters more than compression speed.
- Includes multiple compression levels, ranging from fast asset-oriented settings to higher density modes.
- Supports seekable archives with a seek table for random-access decompression.
- Offers hand-tuned SIMD paths including AVX2/AVX-512 on x86_64 and NEON on ARM.
- Provides buffer, stream, and reusable context APIs for different integration needs.
- Supports multi-threaded streaming and configurable block sizes.
- Includes official bindings for Rust, Python, Node.js, Go, and WebAssembly.
- Can be used as an external compressor with tar.
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Website: github.com/hellobertrand/zxc
Support:
Developer: Bertrand Lebonnois and contributors
License: BSD 3-Clause License
ZXC is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Compression Tools | |
|---|---|
| LZ4 | Focused on compression and decompression speed |
| Zstandard | Fast compression algorithm, providing high compression ratios |
| brotli | Generic-purpose lossless compression algorithm |
| lzop | File compressor favoring speed over compression ratio |
| pigz | Parallel implementation of gzip |
| ouch | CLI tool for compressing and decompressing for various formats |
| pixz | Parallel, indexed xz compressor |
| gzip | Provides the standard GNU file compression utilities |
| BZip3 | Spiritual successor to BZip2 |
| bzip2 | Freely available, patent free, high-quality data compressor |
| PBZIP2 | Parallel implementation of bzip2 |
| lrzip | Achieve very high compression ratios and speed when used with large files |
| lbzip2 | Multi-threaded implementation of bzip2, suited for serial and parallel processing |
| plzip | Massively parallel lossless data compressor |
| p7zip-zstd | p7zip fork with additional codecs and improvements |
| 7-Zip | File archiver with a high compression ratio |
| ncompress | Fast, simple LZW file compressor |
| PXZ | Runs LZMA compression on multiple cores and processors |
| crabz | Like pigz but written in Rust |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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