I’m a huge fan of Rust (❤️).

In a [previous post]({% post_url 2018-06-25-fo2dat-sideproject %}) I demoed fo2dat, which can be used to unpack Fallout 2 DAT2 files. I used the venerable flate2 crate for that project, but I’ve since learnt about libdeflate, which reported to be a much faster block-based DEFLATE (de)compression library.

libdeflate didn’t have Rust bindings, so I wrote some as a learning exercise. The result is libdeflater, which exposes a safe Rust API to the library. Benchmarks indicate that the library is around 2-3x faster than flate2, which is based on zlib and minizip. That’s a pretty insane speedup for such a popular compression format.