minlz

A high-performance Rust implementation of the S2 compression format, providing binary compatibility with the Go implementation at github.com/klauspost/compress/s2.

Features

• Binary Compatible: All four encode modes (encode, encode_better, encode_best, encode_snappy) produce byte-for-byte identical output to Go's s2.Encode* on every test input
• Decode-Heavy Performance: 6–27× faster decode than Go's AMD64 assembly path on the same machine, peaking at ~135 GiB/s on L1-resident blocks; see BENCHMARKS.md for the full apples-to-apples table
• Multiple Compression Levels: Standard, Better, and Best modes
• Stateful Encoder: Encoder struct that reuses hash-table buffers across calls for hot-loop workloads
• Stream Format: Full Reader/Writer support with CRC32 validation
• Block Format: Simple block-based compression for known-size data
• Command-Line Tools: Full-featured s2c and s2d tools compatible with Go implementation
• Dictionary Compression: Full support for dictionary-based compression
• Concurrent Compression: Optional parallel compression with Rayon
• Index Support: Seeking within compressed streams
• Mostly Safe Rust: A few well-documented unsafe blocks in hot paths (uninitialised Vec allocation); covered by unit, property-based, libfuzzer, and Go-binary-compat tests

S2 Format

S2 is an extension of the Snappy compression format that provides:

• Better compression ratios than Snappy
• Faster decompression than Snappy
• Extended copy operations for better compression
• Repeat offset optimization (S2 extension)
• Compatible with Snappy-compressed data (for decompression)

Note: S2-compressed data cannot be decompressed by Snappy decoders.

More Information: S2 Design & Improvements - Overview of S2's design and improvements

Installation

Add this to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
minlz = "1"

Optional Features

Enable concurrent compression for improved performance on multi-core systems:

[dependencies]
minlz = { version = "1", features = ["concurrent"] }

Usage

Block Format (Simple Compression)

use minlz::{encode, decode};

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let data = b"Hello, World! This is a test.";

    // Compress
    let compressed = encode(data);
    println!("Compressed {} bytes to {} bytes", data.len(), compressed.len());

    // Decompress
    let decompressed = decode(&compressed)?;
    assert_eq!(data, &decompressed[..]);

    Ok(())
}

Stream Format (With CRC Validation)

use minlz::{Writer, Reader};
use std::io::{Write, Read};

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let data = b"Streaming compression with CRC validation!";

    // Compress using stream format
    let mut compressed = Vec::new();
    {
        let mut writer = Writer::new(&mut compressed);
        writer.write_all(data)?;
        writer.flush()?;
    }

    // Decompress using stream format
    let mut reader = Reader::new(&compressed[..]);
    let mut decompressed = Vec::new();
    reader.read_to_end(&mut decompressed)?;

    assert_eq!(data, &decompressed[..]);
    Ok(())
}

Multiple Compression Levels

use minlz::{encode, encode_better, encode_best};

let data = b"Some data to compress...";

// Fast compression (default)
let compressed = encode(data);

// Better compression (slower)
let compressed_better = encode_better(data);

// Best compression (slowest)
let compressed_best = encode_best(data);

Buffer Reuse with Encoder

For hot loops compressing many small/medium blocks, the stateful Encoder keeps its internal hash tables across calls — eliminating the per-call allocation cost. Output is bit-for-bit identical to the corresponding free function.

use minlz::Encoder;

let mut enc = Encoder::new();
let mut outputs: Vec<Vec<u8>> = Vec::new();
for chunk in inputs.chunks(4096) {
    outputs.push(enc.encode(chunk));            // standard
    // or enc.encode_better(chunk), enc.encode_best(chunk), enc.encode_snappy(chunk)
}
# let _ = outputs;
# let inputs: &[u8] = b"";

Buffer reuse is up to +30 % on 1 KB encode_better and matches the free-function performance for larger inputs.

Concurrent Compression (Optional Feature)

Enable the concurrent feature for parallel compression on multi-core systems:

use minlz::ConcurrentWriter;
use std::io::Write;

let mut compressed = Vec::new();
{
    // Compress with 4 concurrent workers
    let mut writer = ConcurrentWriter::new(&mut compressed, 4);
    writer.write_all(&large_data)?;
    writer.flush()?;
}

Dictionary Compression

Dictionaries can improve compression of similar data by pre-seeding the compressor with common patterns:

use minlz::{make_dict, encode_with_dict, decode_with_dict};

// Create a dictionary from sample data
let samples = b"Common patterns that appear frequently in your data...";
let dict = make_dict(samples, Some(b"Common")).unwrap();

// Encode with dictionary
let data = b"Data to compress...";
let compressed = encode_with_dict(data, &dict);

// Decode with dictionary
let decompressed = decode_with_dict(&compressed, &dict)?;
assert_eq!(data, &decompressed[..]);

// Serialize dictionary for storage/transmission
let dict_bytes = dict.to_bytes();

Command-Line Tools

The minlz-tools package provides s2c (compression) and s2d (decompression) command-line tools that are fully compatible with the Go s2 tools.

# Install from source
cargo install --path minlz-tools

# Compress a file
s2c input.txt              # Creates input.txt.s2
s2c --slower input.txt     # Best compression
s2c --faster input.txt     # Fast compression

# Decompress a file
s2d input.txt.s2           # Creates input.txt
s2d --verify input.txt.s2  # Verify integrity

The tools are cross-compatible with Go's s2c/s2d and offer 12-98x faster performance depending on the operation.

See minlz-tools/README.md for complete documentation.

Performance

All numbers below are single-thread throughput on Intel Core i9-14900K with RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" for Rust and GOAMD64=v3 (AVX2 enabled) for Go 1.25. Both columns measured on the same machine with identical input generators — see BENCHMARKS.md for the full table, methodology, and per-version changelog.

Decode (Rust dominates)

Data Size	Pattern	Rust	Go (s2)	Rust / Go
1 KB	Random	38.1 GiB/s	6.4 GB/s	6.4×
10 KB	Random	103.6 GiB/s	5.3 GB/s	21×
10 KB	Repeated	134.8 GiB/s	5.4 GB/s	27×
10 KB	Text	91.4 GiB/s	5.3 GB/s	18×
100 KB	Random	70.6 GiB/s	5.3 GB/s	14×

Peak: 135 GiB/s on L1-resident blocks. The 100 KB cases are DRAM- bandwidth-bound at 70+ GiB/s.

Encode (Go wins standard, tied elsewhere)

Mode	Data Size	Pattern	Rust	Go (s2)	Rust / Go
Standard	10 KB	Random	8.2 GiB/s	23.1 GiB/s	0.36×
Standard	100 KB	Text	8.4 GiB/s	30.6 GiB/s	0.27×
Better	10 KB	Text	10.9 GiB/s	7.3 GiB/s	1.49×
Better	100 KB	Text	8.0 GiB/s	10.0 GiB/s	0.80×
Best	10 KB	Text	109 MiB/s	116 MiB/s	0.94×
Best	100 KB	Text	1031 MiB/s	1038 MiB/s	0.99×

Honest summary (against an apples-to-apples single-thread Go run on the same i9-14900K, not the parallel-16-core aggregate the Go README publishes):

• Decode: minlz is 6–27× faster than Go.
• Standard encode: Go is 2–4× faster — its hand-tuned AMD64 assembly inner loop is hard to beat from pure Rust.
• Better encode: roughly tied, minlz wins ~10 KB, Go wins ~100 KB.
• Best encode: essentially identical (both bottleneck on the multi-candidate scoring algorithm rather than the inner loop).
• Encoder output is byte-for-byte identical to Go across all four modes (verified by compat tests).

If decode throughput is your priority — caching, log decompression, streaming reads — minlz wins decisively. If you encode large blobs in the standard "fast" mode and never decode in-process, klauspost/compress/s2 is currently faster on that specific path.

See BENCHMARKS.md for the full table, per-version changelog of optimisations, and reused-Encoder numbers.

Binary Compatibility

This implementation is binary compatible with the Go version in both directions:

• Decode: any S2 (or Snappy) stream produced by Go is accepted byte-for-byte.
• Encode: every encode mode (encode, encode_better, encode_best, encode_snappy) produces byte-for-byte identical output to the corresponding Go function on the test inputs in tests/go_compatibility.rs, tests/better_compatibility.rs, tests/best_compatibility.rs, and tests/snappy_compat.rs.

You can therefore compress data with this Rust library and decompress it with the Go library, and vice versa.

Example: Interoperability with Go

Rust side:

use minlz::encode;
use std::fs::File;
use std::io::Write;

let data = b"Hello from Rust!";
let compressed = encode(data);

let mut file = File::create("data.s2")?;
file.write_all(&compressed)?;

Go side:

package main

import (
    "os"
    "github.com/klauspost/compress/s2"
)

func main() {
    compressed, _ := os.ReadFile("data.s2")
    decompressed, _ := s2.Decode(nil, compressed)
    println(string(decompressed)) // "Hello from Rust!"
}

Examples

Run the included examples:

# Basic compression example
cargo run --example basic

# Debug/testing example
cargo run --example debug

Block vs Stream Format

This library implements both formats:

Block Format

Suitable for:

• Data of known size
• In-memory compression
• Simple use cases
• Maximum compression speed

Stream Format

Includes:

• ✓ CRC32 validation (Castagnoli polynomial)
• ✓ Chunk framing with magic headers
• ✓ Full streaming support via Reader/Writer
• ✓ Incremental reading/writing
• ✓ Compatible with Go s2.Reader/Writer

Use stream format for file I/O, network streaming, or when you need data integrity validation.

Testing

This implementation includes comprehensive testing infrastructure:

Run Tests

# Unit and integration tests
cargo test

# Property-based tests (proptest) — stress with 2000 cases each
PROPTEST_CASES=2000 cargo test --test proptest

# Benchmarks
RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo bench

# Fuzz testing
cargo install cargo-fuzz
cargo fuzz run fuzz_roundtrip
cargo fuzz run fuzz_decode
cargo fuzz run fuzz_stream

Test Coverage

• 86 unit tests in src/ — core functionality, edge cases, encoder regressions
• 10 property-based tests (tests/proptest.rs) — roundtrip for every compression level, stream format, decoder robustness, empty/all-same-byte edges
• Go binary-compat integration tests — tests/go_compatibility.rs, tests/better_compatibility.rs, tests/best_compatibility.rs
• Snappy round-trip tests — tests/snappy_compat.rs
• 3 libfuzzer targets — fuzz_roundtrip, fuzz_decode, fuzz_stream
• Concurrent compression tests (with concurrent feature)
• Benchmark suite — encode/decode/roundtrip + Encoder-reuse group

License

BSD-3-Clause

References

• S2 Design & Improvements - Overview of S2's design and improvements over Snappy
• Go S2 Implementation - Reference implementation
• Snappy Format Specification - Base Snappy format

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please ensure:

1. All tests pass (cargo test)
2. Code is formatted (cargo fmt)
3. No clippy warnings (cargo clippy)
4. Binary compatibility with Go implementation is maintained

The current implementation passes all unit, integration, proptest, and compatibility tests, is formatted with rustfmt, and has zero clippy warnings under -D warnings.