Zstandard in Rust
Zstandard is a modern successor to zlib, providing better compression faster. Zstandard in Rust is in development; it aims to provide excellent performance while introducing memory safety.
The project will provide a dynamic library that is a drop-in replacement for C/C++ counterparts, but has compiled memory-safe Rust code inside.
For the high level goals of our data compression projects, see our Data compression initiative.
About
Development of Zstandard in Rust began in July 2025. In May of 2026 we released the first version that includes the decoder and the dictionaty builder.
We thank Chainguard, Astral, Sovereign Tech Agency and NLnet Foundation for their support.
Roadmap
- 2025 Q3: start of decoder implementation (completed)
- 2025 Q4: implementation of dictBuilder feature (completed)
- 2026 Q1: release of decoder (completed)
- 2026 Q2: start of encoder implementation (pending funding)
For details see the workplan.
Support Zstandard in Rust
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.
Initiative supporters & funders
Blog and news
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Announcing Zstandard in Rust
Over the past year, we've been silently working on our third compression project. After zlib and bzip2 we're now taking on zstd with libzstd-rs-sys, and are proud to announce its first release.
Read more ... -
Fixing our own problems in the Rust compiler
In our data compression projects, we use Rust where C is traditionally used. During the work, we've hit limitations in Rust itself and in the surrounding tooling. Over the years, we've become increasingly comfortable with fixing these issues ourselves.
Read more ...