zstd/lib/README.md

zstd - library files

The lib directory contains several directories. Depending on target use case, it's enough to include only files from relevant directories.

API

Zstandard's stable API is exposed within zstd.h, at the root of lib directory.

Advanced API

Some additional API may be useful if you're looking into advanced features :

• common/error_public.h : transforms size_t function results into an enum, for precise error handling.
• ZSTD_STATIC_LINKING_ONLY : if you define this macro before including zstd.h, it will give access to advanced and experimental API. These APIs shall never be used with dynamic library ! They are not "stable", their definition may change in the future. Only static linking is allowed.

Modular build

Directory common/ is required in all circumstances. You can select to support compression only, by just adding files from the compress/ directory, In a similar way, you can build a decompressor-only library with the decompress/ directory.

Other optional functionalities provided are :

• dictBuilder/ : source files to create dictionaries. The API can be consulted in dictBuilder/zdict.h. This module also depends on common/ and compress/ .

• legacy/ : source code to decompress previous versions of zstd, starting from v0.1. This module also depends on common/ and decompress/ . Note that it's required to compile the library with ZSTD_LEGACY_SUPPORT = 1 . The main API can be consulted in legacy/zstd_legacy.h. Advanced API from each version can be found in its relevant header file. For example, advanced API for version v0.4 is in zstd_v04.h .

Streaming API

Streaming is currently provided by common/zbuff.h.

Miscellaneous

The other files are not source code. There are :

• LICENSE : contains the BSD license text
• Makefile : script to compile or install zstd library (static and dynamic)
• libzstd.pc.in : for pkg-config (make install)