pigzpp: Fast, Parallel, Portable Compression for the Whole Stack

Abstract

pigz is a widely deployed parallel gzip utility, but its process-global mutable state means that it was not designed as a reentrant, directly embeddable library. pigzpp is a from-scratch C++23 rewrite that turns the design into a thread-safe library with one accelerated DEFLATE core exposed to C++, Python, WebAssembly, Go, and Rust. As application-level conveniences built on that same core, it also provides multi-entry ZIP archives and a fast PNG codec. Its portable zlib-ng backend preserves gzip/zlib's ratio; its Intel ISA-L backend is an x86-64-only fast path that produces about 10% larger output at level 6 on our text corpus. In that configuration, zlib-ng reaches 2.1 times the CLI throughput of pigz and 16 times that of Python's in-memory gzip; ISA-L reaches 8.5 times and 50 times, respectively. Outputs remain standards-compliant and cross-decode with gzip, pigz, and unzip. The result is a self-contained, multi-platform compression stack and a case study in AI-assisted modernization under automated compatibility tests.