zlib-rs
zlib-rs is an implementation of the widely-used compression library zlib in Rust. It provides excellent performance while introducing memory safety.
zlib-rs is part of our Data compression initiative.
What we've done
The initial development of zlib-rs was started and funded by Prossimo and Tweede golf. In 2024, an early release of zlib-rs was integrated in flate2 and an audit by ISRG was succesfully completed. Optimizations for Webassembly were included.
During 2025, zlib-rs was adopted by 3000+ projects and we achieved our goal of on-par performance, see /blog/zlib-rs-is-faster-than-c/.
Roadmap
Work has started on a mature Rust API for zlib-rs that is expected to be released in February 2026. See the zlib-rs workplan for milestone details.
Support zlib-rs
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.
Supporters & funders
Past supporters & funders
Blog and news
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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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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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