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Ruzstd (a pure rust zstd format implementation)

Released API docs CI

What is this

A pure Rust implementation of the Zstandard compression format, as defined in RFC8878.

This crate contains a fully operational implementation of the decompression portion of the standard. It also provides a compressor which is usable, but it does not yet reach the speed, ratio or configurability of the original zstd library.

This crate is currently actively maintained.

Current Status

Feature complete on the decoder side.

On the compression side:

  • Support for generating compressed blocks at any compression level
    • Uncompressed
    • Fastest (roughly level 1)
    • Default (roughly level 3)
    • Better (roughly level 7)
    • Best (roughly level 11)
  • Checksums
  • Dictionaries

Speed

In terms of speed this library is behind the original C implementation which has a rust binding located here.

Measuring with the 'time' utility the original zstd and my decoder both decoding the same enwik9.zst file from a ramfs, my decoder is about 3.5 times slower. Enwik9 is highly compressible, for less compressible data (like a ubuntu installation .iso) my decoder comes close to only being 1.4 times slower.

How can you use it?

Compression

The easiest is to use the provided compress/compress_to_vec functions

use ruzstd::encoding::{compress, compress_to_vec, CompressionLevel};
let data: &[u8] = todo!();
// Either
let mut compressed = Vec::new();
compress(data, &mut compressed, CompressionLevel::Fastest);
// or
let compressed = compress_to_vec(data, CompressionLevel::Fastest);

Or you can use the FrameDecoder manually to compress data. This allows you to process encoded data while it is being encoded instead of collecting into a big vector.

Decompression

Additionally to the descriptions and the docs you can have a look at the zstd / zstd_streaming binaries. They showcase how this library can be used.

Easy

The easiest is to wrap the io::Read into a StreamingDecoder which itself implements io::Read. It will decode blocks as necessary to fulfill the read requests

use ruzstd::decoding::StreamingDecoder;
use ruzstd::io::Read;

let mut source: &[u8] = todo!("Get a reader from a File or any other source");
let mut decoder = StreamingDecoder::new(&mut source).unwrap();

let mut result = Vec::new();
decoder.read_to_end(&mut result).unwrap();

This might be a problem if you are accepting user provided data. Frames can be REALLY big when decoded. If this is the case you should either check how big the frame actually is or use the memory efficient approach described below.

Memory efficient

If memory is a concern you can decode frames partially. There are two ways to do this:

Streaming decoder

Use the StreamingDecoder and use a while loop to fill your buffer (see src/bin/zstd_stream.rs for an example). This is the recommended approach.

Use the lower level FrameDecoder

For an example see the src/bin/zstd.rs file. Basically you can decode the frame until either a given block count has been decoded or the decodebuffer has reached a certain size. Then you can collect no longer needed bytes from the buffer and do something with them, discard them and resume decoding the frame in a loop until the frame has been decoded completely.

Roadmap

  1. More Performance optimizations
    1. sequence_decoding and reverse_bitreader::get_bits. Those account for about 50% of the whole time used in decoding
    2. Matching suffixes. This accounts for >60% of the whole time used in encoding
  2. Implement encoder features
    1. More levels
    2. Dictionaries
    3. Checksums

Testing

Tests take two forms.

  1. Tests using well-formed files that have to decode correctly and are checked against their originals
  2. Tests using malformed input that have been generated by the fuzzer. These don't have to decode (they are garbage) but they must not make the decoder panic

Fuzzing

Fuzzing has been done on

  1. Random input with no initial corpus
  2. The *.zst in /fuzz_decodecorpus

You want to help fuzz?

Use cargo +nightly fuzz run decode or some other fuzz target to run the fuzzer. It is seeded with files created with decodecorpus.

If the fuzzer finds a crash it will be saved to the artifacts dir by the fuzzer. Run cargo test artifacts to run the artifacts tests. This will tell you where the decoder panics exactly. If you are able to fix the issue please feel free to do a pull request. If not please still submit the offending input and I will see how to fix it myself.

Contributing

Contributions will be published under the same MIT license as this project. Please make an entry in the Changelog.md file when you make a PR.