**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 (which LZMA and ZPAQ cover) nor extreme speeds (which LZ4 covers).
For a taste of its performance, here are a few benchmark numbers, completed on a Core i5-4300U @ 1.9 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.
But similar to [LZ4](https://github.com/Cyan4973/lz4), zstd can offer derivatives trading compression time for compression ratio, while 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 the 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 development is starting. So consider current results merely as early ones. The implementation will gradually evolve and improve overtime, especially during this first year. This is a phase which will depend a lot on user feedback, since these feedback will be key in deciding next priorities or features to add.
The "master" branch is reserved for stable release and betas.
The "dev" branch is the one where all contributions will be merged. If you plan to propose a patch, please commit into the "dev" branch. Direct commit to "master" are not permitted.
Feature branches will also exist, typically to introduce new requirements, and be temporarily available for testing before merge into "dev" branch.
