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Overview

libdeflate is a library for fast, whole-buffer DEFLATE-based compression and decompression.

The supported formats are:

  • DEFLATE (raw)
  • zlib (a.k.a. DEFLATE with a zlib wrapper)
  • gzip (a.k.a. DEFLATE with a gzip wrapper)

libdeflate is heavily optimized. It is significantly faster than the zlib library, both for compression and decompression, and especially on x86 processors. In addition, libdeflate provides optional high compression modes that provide a better compression ratio than the zlib's "level 9".

libdeflate itself is a library, but the following command-line programs which use this library are also provided:

  • gzip (or gunzip), a program which mostly behaves like the standard equivalent, except that it does not yet have good streaming support and therefore does not yet support very large files
  • benchmark, a program for benchmarking in-memory compression and decompression

For the release notes, see the NEWS file.

Table of Contents

Building

For UNIX

Just run make, then (if desired) make install. You need GNU Make and either GCC or Clang. GCC is recommended because it builds slightly faster binaries.

By default, the following targets are built: the static library libdeflate.a, the shared library libdeflate.so, the gzip program, and the gunzip program (which is actually just a hard link to gzip). Benchmarking and test programs such as benchmark are not built by default. You can run make help to display the available build targets.

There are also many options which can be set on the make command line, e.g. to omit library features or to customize the directories into which make install installs files. See the Makefile for details.

For macOS

Prebuilt macOS binaries can be installed with Homebrew:

brew install libdeflate

But if you need to build the binaries yourself, see the section for UNIX above.

For Windows

Prebuilt Windows binaries can be downloaded from https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate/releases. But if you need to build the binaries yourself, MinGW (gcc) is the recommended compiler to use. If you're performing the build on Windows (as opposed to cross-compiling for Windows on Linux, for example), you'll need to follow the directions in one of the two sections below to set up a minimal UNIX-compatible environment using either Cygwin or MSYS2, then do the build. (Other MinGW distributions may not work, as they often omit basic UNIX tools such as sh.)

Alternatively, libdeflate may be built using the Visual Studio toolchain by running nmake /f Makefile.msc. However, while this is supported in the sense that it will produce working binaries, it is not recommended because the binaries built with MinGW will be significantly faster.

Also note that 64-bit binaries are faster than 32-bit binaries and should be preferred whenever possible.

Using Cygwin

Run the Cygwin installer, available from https://cygwin.com/setup-x86_64.exe. When you get to the package selection screen, choose the following additional packages from category "Devel":

  • git
  • make
  • mingw64-i686-binutils
  • mingw64-i686-gcc-g++
  • mingw64-x86_64-binutils
  • mingw64-x86_64-gcc-g++

(You may skip the mingw64-i686 packages if you don't need to build 32-bit binaries.)

After the installation finishes, open a Cygwin terminal. Then download libdeflate's source code (if you haven't already) and cd into its directory:

git clone https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate
cd libdeflate

(Note that it's not required to use git; an alternative is to extract a .zip or .tar.gz archive of the source code downloaded from the releases page. Also, in case you need to find it in the file browser, note that your home directory in Cygwin is usually located at C:\cygwin64\home\<your username>.)

Then, to build 64-bit binaries:

make CC=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc

or to build 32-bit binaries:

make CC=i686-w64-mingw32-gcc

Using MSYS2

Run the MSYS2 installer, available from http://www.msys2.org/. After installing, open an MSYS2 shell and run:

pacman -Syu

Say y, then when it's finished, close the shell window and open a new one. Then run the same command again:

pacman -Syu

Then, install the packages needed to build libdeflate:

pacman -S git \
          make \
          mingw-w64-i686-binutils \
          mingw-w64-i686-gcc \
          mingw-w64-x86_64-binutils \
          mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc

(You may skip the mingw-w64-i686 packages if you don't need to build 32-bit binaries.)

Then download libdeflate's source code (if you haven't already):

git clone https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate

(Note that it's not required to use git; an alternative is to extract a .zip or .tar.gz archive of the source code downloaded from the releases page. Also, in case you need to find it in the file browser, note that your home directory in MSYS2 is usually located at C:\msys64\home\<your username>.)

Then, to build 64-bit binaries, open "MSYS2 MinGW 64-bit" from the Start menu and run the following commands:

cd libdeflate
make clean
make

Or to build 32-bit binaries, do the same but use "MSYS2 MinGW 32-bit" instead.

API

libdeflate has a simple API that is not zlib-compatible. You can create compressors and decompressors and use them to compress or decompress buffers. See libdeflate.h for details.

There is currently no support for streaming. This has been considered, but it always significantly increases complexity and slows down fast paths. Unfortunately, at this point it remains a future TODO. So: if your application compresses data in "chunks", say, less than 1 MB in size, then libdeflate is a great choice for you; that's what it's designed to do. This is perfect for certain use cases such as transparent filesystem compression. But if your application compresses large files as a single compressed stream, similarly to the gzip program, then libdeflate isn't for you.

Note that with chunk-based compression, you generally should have the uncompressed size of each chunk stored outside of the compressed data itself. This enables you to allocate an output buffer of the correct size without guessing. However, libdeflate's decompression routines do optionally provide the actual number of output bytes in case you need it.

Windows developers: note that the calling convention of libdeflate.dll is "stdcall" -- the same as the Win32 API. If you call into libdeflate.dll using a non-C/C++ language, or dynamically using LoadLibrary(), make sure to use the stdcall convention. Using the wrong convention may crash your application. (Note: older versions of libdeflate used the "cdecl" convention instead.)

Bindings for other programming languages

The libdeflate project itself only provides a C library. If you need to use libdeflate from a programming language other than C or C++, consider using the following bindings:

Note: these are third-party projects which haven't necessarily been vetted by the authors of libdeflate. Please direct all questions, bugs, and improvements for these bindings to their authors.

DEFLATE vs. zlib vs. gzip

The DEFLATE format (rfc1951), the zlib format (rfc1950), and the gzip format (rfc1952) are commonly confused with each other as well as with the zlib software library, which actually supports all three formats. libdeflate (this library) also supports all three formats.

Briefly, DEFLATE is a raw compressed stream, whereas zlib and gzip are different wrappers for this stream. Both zlib and gzip include checksums, but gzip can include extra information such as the original filename. Generally, you should choose a format as follows:

  • If you are compressing whole files with no subdivisions, similar to the gzip program, you probably should use the gzip format.
  • Otherwise, if you don't need the features of the gzip header and footer but do still want a checksum for corruption detection, you probably should use the zlib format.
  • Otherwise, you probably should use raw DEFLATE. This is ideal if you don't need checksums, e.g. because they're simply not needed for your use case or because you already compute your own checksums that are stored separately from the compressed stream.

Note that gzip and zlib streams can be distinguished from each other based on their starting bytes, but this is not necessarily true of raw DEFLATE streams.

Compression levels

An often-underappreciated fact of compression formats such as DEFLATE is that there are an enormous number of different ways that a given input could be compressed. Different algorithms and different amounts of computation time will result in different compression ratios, while remaining equally compatible with the decompressor.

For this reason, the commonly used zlib library provides nine compression levels. Level 1 is the fastest but provides the worst compression; level 9 provides the best compression but is the slowest. It defaults to level 6. libdeflate uses this same design but is designed to improve on both zlib's performance and compression ratio at every compression level. In addition, libdeflate's levels go up to 12 to make room for a minimum-cost-path based algorithm (sometimes called "optimal parsing") that can significantly improve on zlib's compression ratio.

If you are using DEFLATE (or zlib, or gzip) in your application, you should test different levels to see which works best for your application.

Motivation

Despite DEFLATE's widespread use mainly through the zlib library, in the compression community this format from the early 1990s is often considered obsolete. And in a few significant ways, it is.

So why implement DEFLATE at all, instead of focusing entirely on bzip2/LZMA/xz/LZ4/LZX/ZSTD/Brotli/LZHAM/LZFSE/[insert cool new format here]?

To do something better, you need to understand what came before. And it turns out that most ideas from DEFLATE are still relevant. Many of the newer formats share a similar structure as DEFLATE, with different tweaks. The effects of trivial but very useful tweaks, such as increasing the sliding window size, are often confused with the effects of nontrivial but less useful tweaks. And actually, many of these formats are similar enough that common algorithms and optimizations (e.g. those dealing with LZ77 matchfinding) can be reused.

In addition, comparing compressors fairly is difficult because the performance of a compressor depends heavily on optimizations which are not intrinsic to the compression format itself. In this respect, the zlib library sometimes compares poorly to certain newer code because zlib is not well optimized for modern processors. libdeflate addresses this by providing an optimized DEFLATE implementation which can be used for benchmarking purposes. And, of course, real applications can use it as well.

License

libdeflate is MIT-licensed.

I am not aware of any patents or patent applications relevant to libdeflate.