Rust compression libraries

Data compression in Rust is a key component for numerous applications, and the Rust community provides a variety of crates to handle this task, including both stream compressors and archivers. Stream compressors transform a stream of bytes into a compressed version, while archivers serialize multiple files and directories. For web applications, gzip/deflate and Brotli are the most widely implemented stream formats. The article evaluates several Rust compression libraries, such as DEFLATE, Snappy, LZ4, ZStandard, LZMA, Zopfli, and Brotli, and also looks at archiving libraries like tar, zip, and rar. These libraries are assessed based on their performance concerning compression and decompression times, the trade-offs between CPU and memory usage, and the compression ratios achieved. The benchmarks are conducted using various files ranging from highly compressible to difficult to compress, on a machine with a Ryzen 3550H CPU running Linux. The study highlights the differences in runtime and efficiency among these libraries, noting that some failed to pass the roundtrip test, which could indicate implementation faults or issues within the libraries themselves.