Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to ZXC – Asymmetric, +40% decode vs. LZ4 on ARM (C, BSD-3, Fuzzed)
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…
ZXC is a data compression library written in C that delivers 40% better decoding performance than LZ4 on ARM processors. Released under the BSD-3 license, it is designed for developers who need efficient decompression… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1

I've spent the last few months working on this codec. It has the following characteristics: - SOTA decompression throughput in its ratio class - Decent ratios (comparable to LZ4 at high effort levels) - Slow compression Most of the gains can be attributed to reducing branches and making decompression very friendly to out-of-order cores, by using a smart format. Results on the tarred Silesia corpus on Intel x86-64 follow: codec decode ratio encode misa77 -0 5219 MB/s 42.64% 54.5 MB/s misa77 -1 4274 MB/s 39.65% 51.2 MB/s lz4 2505 MB/s 47.59% 371 MB/s lz4hc -12…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2

Faster LZMA decoder for x86 CPUs (patch for XZ Utils). - faster_lzma_decoder_x86.patch
2021 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →
- 3

Hello, I would like to share a Rust implementation of the Zstandard seekable format I've been working on. Regular zstd compressed files consist of a single frame, meaning you have to start decompression at the beginning. The seekable format splits compressed data into a series of independent frames, each compressed individually, so that decompression of a section in the middle of an archive only requires zstd to decompress at most a frame's worth of extra data, instead of the entire archive. I started working with the seekable format because I wanted to resume downloads of big zstd…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4

A repository that collects libc ABI files for multiple versions and a tool to combine them into one dataset. - ziglang/libc-abi-tools
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5

Micro LZMA decoder. Contribute to ilyakurdyukov/micro-lzmadec development by creating an account on GitHub.
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6

Ditch Burp Suite’s bloat for zxc, a Rust-built, terminal-based proxy that uses tmux and Vim to intercept HTTP/S and WebSocket traffic. It captures requests for debugging, security testing, or tweaking—fast and lean. # Key Features - Disk Wizardry: Stashes massive datasets on disk-100k+ entries without breaking a sweat. - Addons: Boost your workflow with default support for ffuf and sqlmap, or craft your own addons for extra fun. - Buffer Tweaks: Edit variables in a popup (e.g., b:host, b:scheme) in Interceptor/Repeater to twist requests. - Config Control: TOML files for global…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7

RISC-V's compressed instruction (RVC) extension is intended as an add-on to the regular, 32-bit instruction set, not a replacement or competitor. Its designers intended RVC instructions to be expanded into regular 32-bit RV32I equivalents via a pre-decoder. What happens if we explicitly architect a RISC-V CPU to execute RVC instructions, and "mop up" any RV32I instructions that aren't convenient via a microcode layer? What architectural optimizations are unlocked as a result? "Minimax" is an experimental RISC-V implementation intended to establish if an RVC-optimized CPU is, in practice, any…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8

Long-simmering side project that is finally ready to see the light. HAMTs are a cool persistent data structure and implementing one has been a lot of fun. Beyond the code, there is likely some value in the extensive and largely complete implementation docs; basic benchmarks are linked in the README, too. Kind of aiming to be "the libavl for HAMTs". That is obviously a high and aspirational bar but a distinct possibility if it stirs up a little interest and/or contribution. Anyways, it's time for this to go out, collect feedback and maybe even some use outside of toy projects. Let me…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9

An experimental Python-to-C transpiler and domain specific language for embedded high-performance computing - zanellia/prometeo
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10

Hello everyone, Today we released iceoryx2 v0.4! iceoryx2 is a service-based inter-process communication (IPC) library designed to make communication between processes as fast as possible - like Unix domain sockets or message queues, but orders of magnitude faster and easier to use. It also comes with advanced features such as circular buffers, history, event notifications, publish-subscribe messaging, and a decentralized architecture with no need for a broker. For example, if you're working in robotics and need to process frames from a camera across multiple processes, iceoryx2 makes it…
2024 · ekxide.io · its alternatives →
- 11

I wrote libcorrect in C in 2016 and wanted to revisit it in Rust. Instead of doing just a direct conversion, I went down the rabbit hole of making Rust's std::simd work for me. I ended up with a templated, generic Viterbi decoder for convolutional codes that dispatches the decode at runtime depending on which instruction sets are available. For small rates and orders, the entire decode lives in registers. Larger codes work through memory but take advantage of some acceleration structures. I also spent some time building a tool to find optimal (max d_free) conv codes for a given rate and…
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12

Battery info program for x86-64 Linux laptops in 307 bytes of machine code - meribold/btry
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13MP
I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…
2023 · zamfofex.neocities.org · its alternatives →
- 14

I'd like to share a little toy project of mine, a really simple image codec that can do lossy to full lossless image compression with complete scalability at a byte level granularity - you can compress an image just once, even fully losslessly if needed, and then get any lossy version possible by simply stopping decompression at any offset in the compressed data. This "encode onde, serve many" approach is especially interesting for providing downscaled low quality image previews (LQIP) in as tight a storage budget as possible, and then allowing seamless, transparent refinement as deemed…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15

I have posted a much earlier version of this over a year ago [0]. Since then a lot has changed. Obviously, the name has changed. This happened for the paper publication [1]. I have also optimized the speed, integrated ISA-L for special cases, limited the compression-ratio-dependent maximum memory consumption, and finally added parallelized CRC32 computation, which adds ~5% overhead no matter the number of cores used. At this point, I am leaning towards calling it production-ready although there are still many ideas for improvements. Redoing the benchmarks of the older Show HN, would look…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16

Runs AWS graviton2 images on intel, with native-speed compile times - valkmit/aws-graviton2-on-intel
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17

If you work in C++, and you would like 2+ programs to share data structures (and/or native I/O handles a.k.a. FDs) among each other, there is a good chance Flow-IPC - will make it considerably less annoying to code than typical approaches; and - may massively reduce the latency involved. Those sharing Cap'n Proto-encoded data may have particular interest. Cap'n Proto (https://capnproto.org) is fantastic at its core task - in-place serialization with zero-copy - and we wanted to make the IPC (inter-process communication) involving capnp-serialized messages be zero-copy,…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18

I make a no-CGO Go SQLite driver, by compiling the amalgamation to Wasm, then loading the result with wazero (a CGO-free Wasm runtime). To compile SQLite, I use wasi-sdk, which uses wasi-libc, which is based on musl. It's been said that musl is slow(er than glibc), which is true, to a point. musl uses SWAR on a size_t to implement various functions in string.h. This is fine, except size_t is just 32-bit on Wasm. I found that implementing a few of those functions with Wasm SIMD128 can make them go around 4x faster. Other functions don't even use SWAR; redoing those can make them 16x faster.…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19

Single header stackful cross-platform coroutine library in pure C. - edubart/minicoro
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20

Hi HN, I’m a recent CS graduate. During the past few months I wrote BinaryRPC, an open-source RPC framework in modern C++20 focused on low-latency, binary WebSocket messaging. Why I built it * Wanted first-class session support, pluggable QoS levels and a simple middleware chain (global, specific, multi handler) without extra JSON/XML parsing. * Easy developer experience A quick feature list * Binary WebSocket frames – minimal overhead * Built-in session layer (login / reconnect / heartbeat) * QoS1 / QoS2 with automatic ACK & retry * Plugin system – rooms, msgpack, etc.…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21

Hi HN, I’ve been experimenting with archive format design and built 6cy as a research project. The goal is not to replace zip/7z, but to explore: • block-level codec polymorphism (different compression per block) • streaming-first layout (no global seek required) • better crash recovery characteristics • plugin-based architecture so proprietary codecs can exist without changing the format Right now this is an experimental v0.x format. The specification may still change and compatibility is not guaranteed yet. I’m mainly looking for feedback on the format design rather than performance…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22

Embeddable minimal in-memory GZIP decompression library for embedded systems - wkoszek/mini_gzip
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23

Like pigz, but rust. Contribute to sstadick/crabz development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24

This project is a little performance-optimization experiment focused on reducing the size of Go binary patches, which can be useful for quick incremental updates of live services. When a Go program grows by a few bytes through an incremental change, a bunch of related references and offsets throughout the compiled binary end up changing that makes general-purpose binary-diff encoders inefficient: `zstd --patch-from` produces a 530kb patch for a one-line change in a 30MB binary. bsdiff improves upon this (150KB patch) thanks to a delta compression algorithm that can handle relative offsets.…
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- misa77 - a codec that decodes 2x faster than LZ4 (at better ratios) alternatives
- 10-40% faster LZMA decoder using x86 CMOVcc alternatives
- Zeekstd – Rust Implementation of the ZSTD Seekable Format alternatives
- A 166 KB file for cross compiling glibc for any version, any target alternatives
- Micro LZMA decoder (x86 assembly code golf) alternatives
- Zxc – Rust TLS proxy with tmux and Vim as UI, BurpSuite alternative alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →