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Zlib
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- The correct title of this article is zlib. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
| zlib | |
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| Latest release: | 1.2.3 / 2005-07-18 |
|---|---|
| OS: | cross platform |
| Use: | data compression library |
| License: | License of zlib/libpng |
| Website: | http://www.zlib.net/ |
zlib is a free software/open-source, cross-platform data compression library by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compression program. The first public version, 0.9, was released on May 1, 1995 and was originally intended for use with libpng image library. zlib is distributed under the zlib license.
As of March 2007, zlib is included in Coverity’s Department of Homeland Security–sponsored ongoing examination of select open-source projects. [1]
Today, zlib is something of a de facto standard, to the point that zlib and DEFLATE are often used interchangeably in standards documents. Hundreds of applications for Unix-like operating systems such as Linux rely on it for compression and it is increasingly used on other platforms, such as Microsoft Windows and the Palm OS. A few notable applications are:
- The Linux kernel, where it is used to implement compressed network protocols, compressed file systems and to decompress the kernel image itself at boot time.
- libpng, the reference implementation for the PNG image format, which specifies DEFLATE as the stream compression for its bitmap data.
- The Apache HTTP server, which uses zlib to implement HTTP/1.1 compression.
- The OpenSSH client and server, which rely on zlib to perform the optional compression offered by the SSH protocol.
- The GnuTLS security library, which can optionally use zlib to compress TLS connections.
- MSN Messenger [2]
- Microsoft Office [3]
- QuickTime [4]
zlib is also used in many embedded devices because the code is portable and because the library has a relatively small memory footprint.
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