zlib-ng - zlib for the next generation systems
Maintained by Hans Kristian Rosbach aka Dead2 (zlib-ng àt circlestorm dót org)
Fork Motivation and History
The motivation for this fork was due to seeing several 3rd party contributions containing new optimizations not getting implemented into the official zlib repository.
Mark Adler has been maintaining zlib for a very long time, and he has done a great job and hopefully he will continue for a long time yet. The idea of zlib-ng is not to replace zlib, but to co-exist as a drop-in replacement with a lower threshold for code change.
zlib has a long history and is incredibly portable, even supporting lots of systems that predate the Internet. This is great, but it does complicate further development and maintainability. The zlib code has to make numerous workarounds for old compilers that do not understand ANSI-C or to accommodate systems with limitations such as operating in a 16-bit environment.
Many of these workarounds are only maintenance burdens, some of them are pretty huge code-wise. For example, the [v]s[n]printf workaround code has a whopping 8 different implementations just to cater to various old compilers. With this many workarounds cluttered throughout the code, new programmers with an idea/interest for zlib will need to take some time to figure out why all of these seemingly strange things are used, and how to work within those confines.
So I decided to make a fork, merge all the Intel optimizations, merge the Cloudflare optimizations that did not conflict, plus a couple of other smaller patches. Then I started cleaning out workarounds, various dead code, all contrib and example code as there is little point in having those in this fork for various reasons.
Zlib-ng is a work in progress, and we would be delighted to receive patches, preferably as pull requests on github. Just remember that any code you submit must be your own and it must be zlib licensed.
A lot of improvements have gone into zlib-ng since its start, and numerous people have contributed both small and big improvements, or valuable testing.
Please read LICENSE.md, it is very simple and very liberal.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Raske Sider AS / servebolt.com for sponsoring my maintainership of zlib-ng.
Thanks go out to all the people and companies who have taken the time to contribute code reviews, testing and/or patches. Zlib-ng would not have been nearly as good without you.
The deflate format used by zlib was defined by Phil Katz. The deflate and zlib specifications were written by L. Peter Deutsch.
zlib was originally created by Jean-loup Gailly (compression) and Mark Adler (decompression).
Travis CI:
