Data compression
Supporters & funders
Past supporters & funders
Compression algorithms are used in a vast number of protocols and file formats throughout all of computing. Implemented in C, these libraries encounter regular security issues despite receiving extensive industry-wide scrutiny.
Our initiative creates memory-safe implementations of widely-used compression libraries, zlib, Zstandard and bzip2.
The high-level goals for the projects are:
- reduce attack surface through memory safety and improved tooling
- provide on-par performance with C/C++ counterparts
- provide a dynamic library as a drop-in replacement
- provide a pure rust implementation for the existing ecosystem
Please get in touch with us, if you are interested in financially supporting us. We offer technical support services for organizations wanting to adopt our data compression software.
What We've Done
For zlib, we've created an implementation based on zlib-ng, called zlib-rs. It provides on-par performance and is widely used.
In June 2025 we released a new version of the bzip2 crate, see the bzip2 project page, that uses our 100% Rust implementation, /blog/bzip2-crate-switches-from-c-to-rust/.
What's Next
Development of zstd began in July 2025, with the first release of the decoder planned for February 2026. We're currently seeking funding to complete work on the encoder side, see zstd.
Meanwhile, work on zlib-rs and bzip2-rs continues to improve the implementations, enhance performance, and expand adoption.
Roadmap
See the zlib-rs, bzip2-rs and zstd-rs project pages.
Please get in touch with us, if you are interested in financially supporting our data compression projects.
Blog and news
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bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% rust
Today we published bzip2 version 0.6.0, which uses our rust implementation of the bzip2 algorithm, libbz2-rs-sys, by default. The bzip2 crate is now faster and easier to cross-compile.
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SIMD in zlib-rs (part 2): compare256
In part 1 of the "SIMD in zlib-rs" series, we've seen that, with a bit of nudging, autovectorization can produce optimal code for some problems. But that does not always work: with SIMD clever programmers can still beat the compiler.
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SIMD in zlib-rs (part 1): Autovectorization and target features
I'm fascinated by the creative use of SIMD instructions. When you first learn about SIMD, it is clear that doing more multiplications in a single instruction is useful for speeding up matrix multiplication. But how can all of these weird instructions be used to solve problems that aren't just arithmetic?
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Translating bzip2 with c2rust
Over the past couple of months we've been hard at work on libbzip2-rs, a 100% Rust drop-in compatible implementation the bzip2 compression and decompression functionality.
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zlib-rs is faster than C
We've released version 0.4.2 of zlib-rs, featuring a number of substantial performance improvements. We are now (to our knowledge) the fastest api-compatible zlib implementation for decompression, and beat the competition in the most important compression cases too.
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The fastest WASM zlib
This year we started work on zlib-rs, an implementation of Zlib in Rust, with the goal of maintaining excellent performance while introducing memory safety.
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Trifecta Tech Foundation is the new home for memory safe zlib
Today we're pleased to announce that the recently developed open source memory safe implementation of zlib – zlib-rs – initiated by ISRG's Prossimo project now has a new long-term home at our Trifecta Tech Foundation.
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Current zlib-rs performance
Our zlib-rs project implements a drop-in replacement for libz.so, a dynamic library that is widely used to perform gzip (de)compression.
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flate2 release v1.0.29 with new `zlib-rs` feature
With the new zlib-rs feature, a new backend is enabled that brings in a SIMD-accelerated Rust implementation.
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xz incident shows the need for structural change
At Sovereign Tech Fund, we're following the xz incident closely and listening to the many voices in the FOSS maintainer community.
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