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How difficult is this new standard going to be to implement in another language? It seems highly sophisticated -- which is great, of course -- but the cost of that is relying on giants like Facebook to maintain their One True Implementation. For software this is (usually) fine; for a nee standard, it's a problem.

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The format itself is documented (https://github.com/facebook/zstd/blob/master/zstd_compressio...) with the intention of other implementations and language bindings being readily available. We also have a zlib-compatible API for easier porting to applications already using Zlib. Our hope is that Zstandard is both easy to use and easy to contribute to.

The majority of the work was done by a single person though. I think by the time facebook joined the majority design was done. Granted he doesn't seem to be like a normal person so doesn't matter that way.

But for compression isn't majority of the language would actually use bindings rather than implementing it natively for performance to make this moot.

I would assume the road to finding the optimal solution and understanding why it worked is much more complicated than the actual code. And a quick look doesn't seem to suggest its a very big code base for the library itself.

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