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2.1.0-beta1

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@Dead2 Dead2 released this 28 Apr 09:45
· 319 commits to develop since this release
2.1.0-beta1
1c2698f

This release contains two years of development and improvements to zlib-ng, as well as fixes and changes inherited from zlib.

The 2.1.x version series has new targeted minumum buildsystem versions, as detailed on the Wiki https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng/wiki

Buildsystem:

  • Many improvements to the CMake scripts.
  • Improved support for detecting memory alignment functions.
  • Improved support for unaligned access by letting the compiler promote code to unaligned if supported by the CPU.
  • Remove x86 cpu feature detection for TZCNT, safely fallback to BSF.
  • Enable using AVX512 intrinsics with GCC <9.

Optimizations and Enhancements:

  • Decompression is a lot faster (56% faster measured on AVX2-capable x86-64)
  • Compresson is improved for Level 9, at the cost of a little performance.
  • Compression is improved for Level 3, by switching from deflate_fast to deflate_medium.
  • Levels 3 and 4 have been reconfigured to provide a better gradual tradeoff for speed/compression between levels 2 and 5.
  • Deflate_quick (Level 1) has been improved to default to a bigger windowsize and support changing the window size like the other levels.

New instruction set optimizations:

  • Adler32 implementation using AVX512, AVX512-VNNI, VMX.
  • CRC32-B implementation using VPCLMULQDQ & IBM-Z.
  • Slide hash implementation using VMX.
  • Compare256 implementations using SSE2, Neon, & POWER9.
  • Inflate chunk copying using SSSE3 & VSX.

Compatibility and Porting:

  • CRC-32 computation changes from madler/zlib. zlib-ng/zlib-ng#a6155234
  • Compatible and up-to-date with zlib 1.2.13.
  • Removed the usage of macros in zlib-ng.h, making life easier for languages that want to call the C functions without having the C preprocessor (Python, etc).

Improved support more environments:

  • Apple M1
  • vcpkg
  • Emscripten

Testing:

  • Tests have been converted to use GTest. Many new tests have also been added.
  • Gbench support has been added to easily benchmark changes to performance-critical functions.

Misc:

  • Several pieces of core code has been restructured or rewritten.
  • Too many changes to list here, see the git commit log for the full list of changes.

Deprecations:

  • Configure no longer has the full range of tests.
  • NMake is no longer actively supported and tested, it is now community supported.
  • See the wiki for minimum build system versions and deprecations https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng/wiki
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