Last October engineers at Meta announced OpenZL as a format-aware compression framework . OpenZL aims to be speedy yet capable of delivering high compression ratios depending upon what is being compressed. OpenZL is viewed as their next leap in data compression beyond their wonderful work on Zstandard (Zstd). This week there's finally a new OpenZL software release available.

OpenZL v0.2 is now available for this framework that takes a description of the data to be compressed and builds a specialized compression that is optimized for the data. This BSD-licensed software has seen a lot of code changes since the v0.1 debut last October.

The OpenZL 0.2 release introduces "SDDL2" as the new runtime that has become a "real compiler" with the Simple Data Description Language being used to describe binary file formats.

OpenZL 0.2 also presents a new native LZ codec that offers 10% faster compression and 70% faster decompression compared to Zstandard level 1.

OpenZL's zli utility is also now compatible with "huge inputs" up to several gigabytes in size.

OpenZL 0.2 also has API improvements, build and packaging improvements for different platforms, and other enhancements with Meta continuing to invest a lot into this compression framework.

Those wishing to learn more about OpenZL 0.2 can find it on GitHub .