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dropbox
rust-brotli
Rust2016–2026
dropbox / rust-brotli

rust-brotli

Brotli compressor and decompressor written in rust that optionally avoids the stdlib

Data & Databases
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
8Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
970GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Brotli compressor and decompressor written in rust that optionally avoids the stdlib

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-06-29 17:11:26 UTC to 2026-10-24 16:58:37 UTC.

0122016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

9 sources
ATsch·Oct 26, 2020
Ah, that's interesting, I assume this is the link: https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/lossless-compression-wit... Shows a significant improvement in compression code and some examples of checks that can't be elided. I guess this makes sense because it's pretty much the worst case scenario for bounds check impact. I can still personally say that every time I've blamed rust's bounds checks, I was wrong. EDIT: neither the unsafe flag nor the macro appear to be present in https://github.com/dropbox/rust-brotli/ anymore today, removed some time in 2017. So it seems they found some other way to deal with it?
In Single_file_libs: List of single-file C/C++ libraries
rrdharan·Sep 25, 2018
Dropbox uses Go (https://github.com/dropbox/godropbox), Rust (e.g. https://github.com/dropbox/rust-brotli) and Python on the server-side, and both Rust (https://github.com/dropbox/finderinfo-rust) and Python on the client-side. As other commenters have noted, a lot of their Python use for large scale systems was an artifact of history and available choices at the time, but from my experience during my time there and following as an outside observer since leaving, they seem to make reasonable infrastructure and language decisions for their core product.
In How we rolled out one of the largest Python 3 migrations
daniel_rh·Jul 1, 2018
I'm a big corrode fan and I used it (plus a really simple python script https://github.com/dropbox/rust-brotli/blob/master/uncorrode... ) to help translate the brotli encoder https://github.com/google/brotli/tree/master/c/enc to safe, almost-idiomatic rust. My initial attempts used top of tree corrode, but I found that the relooper got in the way of writing idiomatic rust, so I restarted my translation efforts and actually pinned corrode to before the relooper and backported a lot of the improvements that happened since the relooping effort https://github.com/danielrh/corrode/tree/unprocessed_loops On one hand I'm very glad corrode supported the relooper: it got me excited about the capabilities of corrode, but in the end I think any serious port of a project is going to need to think about idiomatic control flow and will require a minor
Read the rest
rewrite of the C code. The improvements to the C brotli encoder happened here https://github.com/danielrh/brotli/commits/corrode to remove the gotos and some negative array access. All in all, the process to get the brotli encoder into rust was very smooth. Much of it may be due to the google engineers being extremely careful about memory ownership and design. Anyhow I'm excited about c2rust, but am nervous that corrode may be de-emphasized since I know it worked well for me. If you want to know more about the experience of porting a large existing project to rust, I posted about the rust brotli decoder here https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/06/lossless-compression-... (subsection "The Port")
In C2rust vs. Corrode
daniel_rh·Aug 1, 2017
I'm the author of https://github.com/dropbox/rust-brotli and I certainly ran into the issues mentioned in the article, and the initial version of my brotli decoder and encoder were each almost 10x slower. I also worked around each and every one of them, and the result is something that performs at 80-90% of the speed of the original on average, and some files compress faster with rust than with the original brotli codec. allocator: I ran into the same situation and abstracted it with a generic allocator: https://github.com/dropbox/rust-alloc-no-stdlib it's an ugly solution, but it works and can allow for significant perf improvements down the line by bundling all same types together benchmarks: I simply made a test that printed the time primitive types: it's easy to write generic functions that do this macro system: I found to be amazing
Read the rest
, but I never used it to compact data types borrow checker: split_at_mut was super helpful...also core::cmp::replace was useful to taking away pieces of a structure and manipulating them, then putting them back Though it wasn't all roses: to try to get SSE vectorization I had to convert this 6 line short string matching function https://github.com/dropbox/rust-brotli/blob/238c9c539b446d7d... into this multi hundred line monster with macros and so forth https://github.com/dropbox/rust-brotli/blob/238c9c539b446d7d... but in the end it was as fast as hand-tuned intrinsics in C I also found myself scared by dependencies, including onto the std library, so I tried to get everything to remain within the core library. This should allow something as low-level as a codec to be used in kernel space or in another place where a custom allocator is needed. I also found that "rewriting in safe rust from C" was made easy by corrode https://github.com/jameysharp/corrode since C and rust can be interface compatible, it's easy to go one file at a time and turn it into working rust, then safe rust.
In Rust: Not So Great For Codec Implementing
0xmohit·Aug 14, 2016
The real takeaway here though, is that although it’s still not perfect, other languages are no longer doing appreciably better. Not sure how accurate is this. At least not true in the context of OCaml/OPAM. As always, I’m sure none of this applies to Rust and Cargo is basically perfect, but that doesn’t matter, because nobody reading this is actually using Rust. So it seems that those using rust don't read HN: https://github.com/servo/servo https://github.com/dropbox/rust-brotli -- Bottom line: Bash everyone else arbitrarily and claim oneself to be the best!
In Python packaging is good now

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