atomicobject/heatshrink

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

1547 stars · 233 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

Heatshrink is a data compression/decompression library written in C, designed for embedded and real-time systems with very low memory requirements (as low as 50 bytes). It provides incremental, bounded CPU usage via a streaming state-machine API, and also ships a standalone command-line tool.

Use cases

• compress data on a microcontroller with under 300 bytes of RAM
• decompress firmware payloads in a hard real-time system
• compress log or sensor data incrementally in tiny input bites
• embed a small compression codec in a C project without dynamic allocation
• compress files from the command line with the heatshrink CLI
• use static memory allocation for a deterministic embedded compressor

When to choose

• you need compression on memory-constrained embedded or real-time targets
• you need bounded, incremental CPU and memory usage per processing step
• you want a permissive ISC license for commercial firmware
• you prefer static allocation and a tiny, copy-in source library

When to avoid

• you need maximum compression ratios on systems with ample RAM
• you need a general-purpose compressor like gzip/zstd with rich format tooling
• you need high-throughput compression of large files on desktop hardware

Facets

library · maturity stable

compression embedded embedded-systems files developer-tools c embedded cli cross-platform lzss real-time low-memory static-allocation streaming-compression

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