15 February 2026

Today I learned about Zstandard, a new compression algorithm, and it really blew my mind. It went against everything I knew about computers, but the explanation became clearer when I learned how ancient today’s standards are.

I always thought there was a compromise for everything, for example, x265 is more efficient than x264, but the compromise is it takes more time to encode and more computational power to watch them. But Zstandard is different: it can compress much more than gzip and it does it much faster!

So where is the catch? The best part is, there is none. It is possible because it uses much more modern computational techniques that we didn’t have in the 90s when gzip was created.

Zstd is mainly an alternative to gzip, not for 7z or rar. It’s mainly for sending data on the web, where it is crucial to be fast at compressing and decompressing. This new standard will make API throughputs higher and websites load faster, which is a huge deal for the web.