lz4_flex

Fastest LZ4 implementation in Rust. Originally based on redox-os' lz4 compression, but now a complete rewrite. The results in the table are from a benchmark in this project (66Kb JSON, 10MB dickens) with the block format.

AMD Ryzen 7 5900HX, rustc 1.69.0 (84c898d65 2023-04-16), Manjaro, CPU Boost Disabled, CPU Governor: Performance

66Kb JSON

Compressor	Compression	Decompression	Ratio
lz4_flex unsafe w. unchecked_decode	1615 MiB/s	5973 MiB/s	0.2284
lz4_flex unsafe	1615 MiB/s	5512 MiB/s	0.2284
lz4_flex safe	1272 MiB/s	4540 MiB/s	0.2284
lzzz (lz4 1.9.3)	1469 MiB/s	5313 MiB/s	0.2283
lz4_fear	662 MiB/s	939 MiB/s	0.2283
snap	1452 MiB/s	1649 MiB/s	0.2242

10 Mb dickens

Compressor	Compression	Decompression	Ratio
lz4_flex unsafe w. unchecked_decode	347 MiB/s	3168 MiB/s	0.6372
lz4_flex unsafe	347 MiB/s	2734 MiB/s	0.6372
lz4_flex safe	259 MiB/s	2338 MiB/s	0.6372
lzzz (lz4 1.9.3)	324 MiB/s	2759 MiB/s	0.6372
lz4_fear	201 MiB/s	370 MiB/s	0.6372
snap	286 MiB/s	679 MiB/s	0.6276

Features

• Very good logo
• LZ4 Block format
• LZ4 Frame format (thanks @arthurprs)
• High performance
• 1,5s clean release build time
• Feature flags to configure safe/unsafe code usage
• no-std support with block format (thanks @coolreader18)
• 32-bit support

Usage:

Compression and decompression uses no unsafe via the default feature flags "safe-encode" and "safe-decode". If you need more performance you can disable them (e.g. with no-default-features).

Safe:

lz4_flex = { version = "0.11" }

Performance:

lz4_flex = { version = "0.11", default-features = false }

Block Format

The block format is only valid for smaller data chunks as block is de/compressed in memory. For larger data use the frame format, which consists of multiple blocks.

use lz4_flex::block::{compress_prepend_size, decompress_size_prepended};

fn main(){
    let input: &[u8] = b"Hello people, what's up?";
    let compressed = compress_prepend_size(input);
    let uncompressed = decompress_size_prepended(&compressed).unwrap();
    assert_eq!(input, uncompressed);
}

no_std support

no_std support is currently only for the block format, since the frame format uses std::io::Write, which is not available in core.

Benchmarks

The benchmark is run with criterion, the test files are in the benches folder.

Currently 4 implementations are compared, this one, lz-fear, the c version via rust bindings and snappy. The lz4-flex version is tested with the feature flags safe-decode and safe-encode switched on and off.

• lz4_cpp: https://crates.io/crates/lzzzz
• lz-fear: https://github.com/main--/rust-lz-fear
• snap: https://github.com/burntsushi/rust-snappy

Tested on AMD Ryzen 7 5900HX, rustc 1.69.0 (84c898d65 2023-04-16), Manjaro, CPU Boost Disabled, CPU 3GHZ

Results v0.11.0 02-06-2023 (safe-decode and safe-encode off)

cargo bench --no-default-features

Results v0.11.0 02-06-2023 (safe-decode and safe-encode on)

cargo bench

Miri

Miri can be used to find issues related to incorrect unsafe usage:

MIRIFLAGS="-Zmiri-disable-isolation -Zmiri-disable-stacked-borrows" cargo +nightly miri test --no-default-features --features frame

Fuzzer

This fuzz target generates corrupted data for the decompressor. cargo +nightly fuzz run fuzz_decomp_corrupt_block and cargo +nightly fuzz run fuzz_decomp_corrupt_frame

This fuzz target asserts that a compression and decompression roundtrip returns the original input. cargo +nightly fuzz run fuzz_roundtrip and cargo +nightly fuzz run fuzz_roundtrip_frame

This fuzz target asserts compression with cpp and decompression with lz4_flex returns the original input. cargo +nightly fuzz run fuzz_roundtrip_cpp_compress

Bindings in other languages

• Node.js: lz4-napi
• Wasm: lz4-wasm

TODO

• High compression

Migrate from v0.10 to v0.11.1

To migrate, just remove the checked-decode feature flag if you used it.