{
  "id": 14492190,
  "title": "ZXC: Lossless compression built for ultra-fast decode",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/14/zxc-lossless-compression-built-for-ultra-fast-decode",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-14T14:36:51.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Lobsters",
    "slug": "lobsters",
    "url": "https://libzxc.org/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "ZXC is a C-based lossless data compression library, distributed under the BSD 3-Clause License. It is optimized for data compressed once and read many times, such as firmware images, game assets, and application bundles. The encoder takes extra time upfront for faster decompression at several gigabytes per second on ARM and x86 processors. ZXC matches LZ4 in speed at every compression level and produces output of equal or smaller size. It is free software with no dependencies and has official bindings for Rust, Python, Node.js, and Go. ZXC's decompression speed is achieved by minimizing branches and utilizing SIMD instructions. Seven compression levels offer a trade-off between compression time and size, with level 3 being the default. ZXC is included in popular compression benchmark suites, lzbench and TurboBench, ensuring reproducibility with other codecs. The decoder's speed comes at the cost of increased compression time, but ZXC still outperforms LZ4 in effective throughput, as measured by decompressed bytes per processor cycle. The library is supported by distributions, package managers, and can be built from source using CMake 3.14 or later and a C17 compiler.",
  "summary": null,
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}