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Hardly surprising when you consider gzip's DEFLATE was around in 1990 and developed by one guy as shareware and zstd was produced by a megacorp in 2015.

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Zstandard was also mainly designed and produced by a single person, Yann Collet.

Yann also developed LZ4

Yes, but they also work for megacorp Facebook, and according to https://github.com/facebook/zstd/graphs/contributors, 300+ other contributors have made 4500+ commits to the zstd repo.

It's not quite as small-scale as 90's-style shareware was.

zstd has improved a lot since it was brought in under the facebook roof, but those are incremental changes, it already existed before then.

Here's the good old blog about that http://fastcompression.blogspot.com/

I recommend the CoRecursive episode about how LZ4 and zstd came to be. It started with making games for a HP calculator. https://corecursive.com/data-compression-yann-collet/

Yes it's worth taking a minute to appreciate how well DEFLATE and gzip has stood up over the years. It's a brilliant format and tool. I was definitely a little too ready to believe the paper that claimed gzip's ability to classify text was better than deep neutral nets, alas it has some limits after all!

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