Just shy of one year ago Meta announced OpenZL as a format-ware compression framework focused on delivering both high compression ratios and high speed compression/decompression. OpenZL has continued making more optimizations and out today is OpenZL v0.3 and advertising some huge gains over Zstandard (Zstd) that is also worked on by Meta engineers.

OpenZL 0.3 ships a major upgrade to its native LZ engine as well as a neural selector to build numeric compression graphs as needed.

The compression speed hasn't changed too much since OpenZL v0.2, but with OpenZL v0.3 the LZ engine is much faster with around 33% higher performance. At equivalent settings, OpenZL 0.3 decompression speed is around 144% faster than Zstandard. Some pretty impressive results for OpenZL v0.3:

The Compression Transformer in OpenZL 0.3 is for choosing the right combination of codecs for a given input. Today's release announcement notes that it compresses on average 35% better than Zstd at its highest compression level 19.

Downloads and more details on the OpenZL 0.3 release via GitHub.