Trifecta Tech Foundation has released a first pre-release of libzstd-rs-sys, a pure-Rust implementation of the Zstandard compression library. Unlike the existing zstd crate that wraps C code, this implementation eliminates the need for a C toolchain, making it easier to target platforms like Windows and WebAssembly. The decompression and dictionary builder are complete, tested against the reference implementation's test suite, with fuzz testing and Miri validation. By default, decompression is a few percent slower than the C reference, but an experimental feature flag disabling four bounds checks matches C performance. Compression support is still in progress and the project is seeking funding. The work also produced upstream contributions to Miri and Clippy. The project is funded by Chainguard, Astral, NLnet Foundation, and Sovereign Tech Agency.
