**Zstd**, short for Zstandard, is a new lossless compression algorithm, which provides both good compression ratio _and_ speed for your standard compression needs. "Standard" translates into everyday situations which neither look for highest possible ratio nor extreme speed.
For a taste of its performance, here are a few benchmark numbers, completed on a Core i7-5600U @ 2.6 GHz, using [fsbench 0.14.3](http://encode.ru/threads/1371-Filesystem-benchmark?p=34029&viewfull=1#post34029), an open-source benchmark program by m^2.
Zstd compression speed will be configurable to fit different situations.
The first version offered is the fast one, at ~250 MB/s per core, which is suitable for a few real-time scenarios.
But similar to [LZ4], zstd can offer derivatives trading compression time for compression ratio, keeping decompression properties intact. "Offline compression", where compression time is of little importance because the content is only compressed once and decompressed many times, is therefore within scope.
Another property zstd is developed for is configurable memory requirement, with the objective to fit into low-memory configurations, or servers handling many connections in parallel.
Zstd is still considered experimental at this stage. Specifically, it doesn't guarantee yet that its current stream/file format will remain supported in future versions of the library. Therefore, only use Zstd in environments where you can control the availability of the decompression library. "Stable" status, including official documented format format and long-term support commitment, is projected sometimes early 2016.
The "dev" branch is the one where all contributions will be merged before reaching "master". If you plan to propose a patch, please commit into the "dev" branch or its own feature branch. Direct commit to "master" are not permitted.
