The Story
zlib is a data compression library that has been around since 1995. It's quite useful and as a result it's widely used. Unfortunately it has a history of memory safety vulnerabilities, a common phenomenon for compression libraries written in C/C++.
We will implement a performant version of zlib in rust. This project has two goals:
- provide a pure rust implementation of zlib to rust users
- provide a zlib-compatible dynamic library that has compiled rust code inside
What We've Done
We contracted with Tweede Golf in December of 2023 for an initial implementation based on zlib-ng, with a focus on maintaining excellent performance while introducing memory safety.
What's Next
We're currently seeking funding to complete work necessary to make the initial implementation ready for production.