LZHAM 1.0 Lossless Data Compression Codec Released

Version 1.0 of LZHAM has been released, the lossless data compression codec spearheaded by Rich Geldreich, the former Valve developer involved in their Linux and OpenGL activities.

Rich Geldreich, one of the most vocal former Valve developers who has in the past talked about the state of Linux gaming and OpenGL, continues working on his LZHAM compression codec in his spare time. As shared last week, the LZHAM 1.0 release has been close with very promising results and as of today the v1.0 release is now available.

LZHAM is inspired by LZMA but focused on providing much faster decompression speeds over it and other alternatives -- with a primary focus on packing game assets and being able to decompress them on the fly in a very fast manner. LZHAM's design also makes it appealing to embedded platforms where fast decompression times are of great importance. The previous LZHAM article on Phoronix shared some of Geldreich's impressive results while in the days since then he's posted many more LZHAM performance figures across platforms to his blog.

Rich now put out the official LZHAM v1.0 release this Sunday morning and the release brings full OS X support. LZHAM is available via the GitHub project page. "LZHAM is a lossless data compression codec written in C/C++ with a compression ratio similar to LZMA but with 1.5x-8x faster decompression speed. It officially supports Linux x86/x64, Windows x86/x64, OSX, and iOS, with Android support on the way."