7-Zip-zstd VS 7z

Do you consider rar a standard? It's a pretty good format, even though there aren't any good open-source implementations. But if you're willing to pay for your software, WinRAR command line versions are available for most platforms.

7zip is the most obvious free alternative. There is also a 7zip fork that offers zstd [1]. The command line experience for 7zip isn't very good however.

1: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

Check out https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

There's also this fork which supports additional compressions: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

7-zip is actually not a bad option, but I'd strongly advise using the fast-lzma2 codec, because, well, it is waay faster, and might even give you better ratios, depending on how you use it. You can find an implementation here, and it is compatible with traditional 7-zip (you can decompress it on any computer with any newish version of 7z)

Hi, PeaZip can use McMilk's additional compression codecs for 7z format (Zstandard, Brotli, Lizard, etc), https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

You can extract the files yourself with 7Zip. You can install 7Zip from here and then install this plugin to extract ZStandard files, or you can directly install the modified 7Zip with the plugin already from that plugin page. Then simply open the zst file you downloaded with 7Zip and extract it.

Looking back at this version history [1], there was perviously a gap of 3.5 years between releases (2011-2014). Skimming through the discussion forums, the 2.5yr gap between 19.00 and 21.07 was filled with a number of alpha and beta releases, eg 20.02 [2]. Version numbering seems to follow a consistent yy.## format since 2015.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/files/7-Zip/

[2] https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/discussion/45797/thread/9...

Also, unlike WinRAR, 7zip is open-source. Code mirror here: https://github.com/kornelski/7z

It's also open source.

AES is only as good as the KDF protecting the key. Looking at the github mirror of its code (updated march 2019), it seems to be using PBKDF2-SHA1 with 1,000 iterations. That's actually really bad because SHA1 is weak, and 1,000 iterations is very low.