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Show HN: ZXC – Asymmetric, +40% decode vs. LZ4 on ARM (C, BSD-3, Fuzzed)

https://github.com/hellobertrand/zxc
1•pollop_•2h ago

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pollop_•1h ago
Hello HN, author here.

I built ZXC, a lossless compression library designed specifically for "Write Once, Read Many" scenarios (Game assets, Firmware, App bundles).

The Concept: Standard real-time codecs (LZ4, Snappy) are designed for symmetry. ZXC explores an asymmetric approach: it spends significantly more CPU cycles at compression time to generate a bitstream specifically structured for modern, wide-issue execution pipelines (maximizing Instruction Level Parallelism).

Performance (Verified via lzbench integration): ZXC was merged into the official lzbench repository monday.

ARM64 (Apple M2): 6,365 MB/s decoding (~40% faster than LZ4). x86_64 (AMD EPYC 9554): At Level 5, ZXC achieves compression ratios comparable to zstd --fast while maintaining nearly 2x the decompression speed (3.8 GB/s vs 2.0 GB/s).

Implementation Details: Written in C99, zero internal allocation (caller provides buffers). Designed for easy FFI (Go/Python/Rust bindings). Validated via continuous fuzzing (ClusterFuzzLite) and static analysis. PR for OSS-Fuzz integration is ready.

This is a v0.1.1 release. The bitstream format is stable but open to improvements based on feedback from the community.

https://github.com/hellobertrand/zxc