Smaller and faster data compression with Zstandard

What this post added

Introduced Zstandard (Zstd) 1.0, a new general-purpose lossless compression algorithm and implementation. Zstd offers significant improvements in compression and decompression speeds compared to Deflate (used in Zip, gzip, zlib) while achieving similar or better compression ratios. Key technical innovations include the use of Finite State Entropy, a performance-first design optimized for modern CPUs, a branchless design to avoid pipeline flushes, and a format designed for parallel execution by separating data into multiple parallel streams. Zstd offers 22 compression levels for granular trade-offs between speed and size, and its memory usage is more flexible than zlib's 32 KB window.