Blosc/c-blosc

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1057 stars · 172 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

C-Blosc is a high-performance, lossless compression library for binary data that uses blocking, shuffling, SIMD, and multi-threading to compress and decompress faster than memcpy(). It acts as a meta-compressor wrapping codecs like LZ4, Snappy, Zlib, and Zstandard. This original C-Blosc is in maintenance mode; C-Blosc2 is the actively developed successor.

Use cases

• compress large binary datasets in memory or on disk
• speed up memory-bound computations with cache-fitting compression
• compress numerical arrays for scientific computing
• choose among multiple compression codecs via one API
• reduce memory bus traffic in data-intensive applications

When to choose

• you need extremely fast lossless compression of binary/numerical data
• you want a single API over LZ4, Zstd, Zlib, Snappy, and BloscLZ
• you need a mature, widely used C library with SIMD and threading support

When to avoid

• you are starting a new project - use C-Blosc2 instead, since this version gets no new features
• you need maximum compression ratio rather than speed
• you need compression of text or streaming data rather than fixed-size binary blocks

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

compression serialization performance big-data developer-tools cross-platform c cpp python meta-compressor simd multithreaded memory-bound lossless binary-data cache-optimization

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