libdeflate

I think this may not be a very high bar. zippy in Nim claims to be about 1.5x to 2.0x faster than zlib: https://github.com/guzba/zippy I think there are also faster zlib's around in C than the standard install one, such as https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate (EDIT: also mentioned elsethread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43381768 by mananaysiempre) zlib itself seems pretty antiquated/outdated these days, but it does remain popular, even as a basis for newer parallel-friendly formats such as https://www.htslib.org/doc/bgzip.html

Zlib-ng is between a couple and multiple times away from the state of the art[1], it’s just that nobody has yet done the (hard) work of adjusting libdeflate[2] to a richer API than “complete buffer in, complete buffer out”. [1] https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng/issues/1486 [2] https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate