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Top 23 C Compression Projects
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lz4 can still be the right choice when decompression speed matters. It's almost twice as fast at decompression with similar compression ratios to zstd's fast setting.
https://github.com/facebook/zstd?tab=readme-ov-file#benchmar...
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cute_headers
Collection of cross-platform one-file C/C++ libraries with no dependencies, primarily used for games
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Project mention: H.264 Streaming Fees: What Changed, Who's Affected, and What It Means | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-03
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cstore_fdw
Columnar storage extension for Postgres built as a foreign data wrapper. Check out https://github.com/citusdata/citus for a modernized columnar storage implementation built as a table access method.
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Interesting example! I've been learning AVX512 by using it to optimize Huffman coding. I found _mm512_permutexvar_epi8 and used it to do byte-indexed lookups, but _mm512_permutex2var_epi8 means I can get by with 2 shuffles and 1 comparison instead of 4 shuffles and 3 comparisons. In the end, on my CPU (AMD 9950x), changing to _mm512_permutex2var_epi8 only sped up compression by ~2%.
Compared to Huff0[1] (used by Zstd), my AVX512 code is currently ~40% faster at both compression and decompression. This requires using 32 datastreams instead of 4 used by Huff0.
[1] https://github.com/Cyan4973/FiniteStateEntropy
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Project mention: Efficient String Compression for Modern Database Systems | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-02-01
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p7zip
A new p7zip fork with additional codecs and improvements (forked from https://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/ AND https://sourceforge.net/projects/p7zip/).
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lizard
Lizard is an efficient compressor with very fast decompression. It achieves compression ratio that is comparable to zip/zlib and zstd/brotli (at low and medium compression levels) at fast decompression speed (by inikep)
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
C Compression discussion
C Compression related posts
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H.264 Streaming Fees: What Changed, Who's Affected, and What It Means
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Gzip decompression in 250 lines of Rust
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An Ode to Bzip
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Evaluating and mitigating the growing risk of LLM-discovered 0-days
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Efficient String Compression for Modern Database Systems
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Docker Image Compression: gzip vs zstd
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We Need SIMD (The Real Reason)
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 10 Jun 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Compression projects in C? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | zstd | 27,210 |
| 2 | LZ4 | 11,850 |
| 3 | ZLib | 6,902 |
| 4 | cute_headers | 5,008 |
| 5 | opus | 3,211 |
| 6 | zlib-ng | 2,025 |
| 7 | LZFSE | 1,819 |
| 8 | cstore_fdw | 1,785 |
| 9 | zip | 1,586 |
| 10 | FiniteStateEntropy | 1,474 |
| 11 | Minizip-ng | 1,458 |
| 12 | smaz | 1,222 |
| 13 | bzip3 | 1,210 |
| 14 | lzbench | 1,056 |
| 15 | c-blosc | 1,053 |
| 16 | p7zip | 941 |
| 17 | squashfs-tools | 912 |
| 18 | TurboPFor | 833 |
| 19 | lizard | 702 |
| 20 | zson | 567 |
| 21 | FastLZ | 533 |
| 22 | gozstd | 477 |
| 23 | precomp-cpp | 458 |
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