Squash Documentation

Introduction

Squash is an abstraction layer which provides a single API to access many compression libraries.

For a high-level overview of how to use Squash, please see the Squash User Guide.

Bindings

Squash is written in C and has minimal hard dependencies, meaning it should be straightforward to create bindings for many languages. In order help with testing, bindings are generally distributed with Squash.

Squash currently supports the following languages:

• C
• Vala

We hope to add more soon. If you're interested in helping, please contact us!

Plugins

The actual integration with individual compression libraries is done through plugins which can be installed separately from Squash itself and are not loaded until they are required. This allows Squash consumers to utilize a great many compression algorithms without rewriting code or unnecessary bloat. Plugins need not be distributed with Squash, though it is preferred.

Squash currently contains plugins for the following libraries:

• Brotli
• bsc
• bzip2
• CRUSH
• DENSITY
• Doboz
• FastARI
• FastLZ
• Gipfeli
• LZ4
• LZF
• liblzg
• LZHAM
• LZJB
• liblzma
• LZO
• QuickLZ
• Snappy
• wfLZ
• yalz77
• zlib
• zling
• ZPAQ
• Zstandard

We hope to add more soon. If you're interested in helping, please contact us!

License

Squash is licensed under the MIT license. Although this license does not place many restrictions on using Squash itself, please keep in mind that some plugins use libraries which are subject to more restrictive terms (such as LZO).