zzlib: a zlib depacker implementation in Lua

  • Tuesday 6 September 2016
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  • By François Galea

I did a Lua implementation of a depacker for the zlib/deflate algorithm. It’s quite efficient for Lua code, even though it obviously won’t compete with a compiled implementation. It can be useful in Lua environments where no access for native C libraries are possible, like the PICO-8 platform.

Performance tests show that typical run times to depack lua-5.3.3.tar.gz on my 2013 i5 laptop are 0.87s with Lua 5.3, and 0.28s with LuaJIT 2.0.4.

The source code and documentation are available on Github, and is made available under the WTFPL license.