Fedora made the switch in F40. Arch has it as a todo.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/ZlibNGTransition

https://archlinux.org/todo/zlib-ng-migration/

Small example of the user experience https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng/issues/1708

Rust wouldn't prevent this would it? Since the root cause is a caller violating an invariant?

Rust caused it.

More charitably, unnecessary churn caused it.

100% churn, IMO. Language didn't matter at all. In the end, the failure was procedural.

This lasted well into the next Fedora release. That means... this endured for at least six months. The reporter caught it in beta, but Fedora and 'zlib-ng' marched on. Not saved until Mono/Unity caught up.

This didn't have to be hamfisted, but... t'was. Performance gains are make-believe when consumers don't work. Fedora should have waited for 41 after finding issues on 40.

Distributions should do more to curate the software they distribute. This technical aspect was reported - and ignored - in the early stages during the 'sentiment gauging' phase on their own forum. Not just the 'zlib-ng' repository.

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f40-change-proposal-t...

It's more important to be seen changing things than doing it well, apparently. The proposal wasn't required to go as it did.

we can always blame it on closed source software!

The just released git 2.49 also has experimental support for -ng.

I can recommend building tar with pigz + zlib-ng enabled by default instead of gzip.

zlib-rs is faster than C:

https://trifectatech.org/blog/zlib-rs-is-faster-than-c/

A library is faster than a language? Awful headline.

Yeah, it was posted on HN and got ~337 points.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43381735

Adding Rust to the mix for marginal gains.

Not sure there's value.

I'd rather port the micro-optimizations done in zlib-rs to zlib-ng and call it a day.

I thought all of the cool people were migrating to zstd. Is this not a thing anymore?

DEFLATE will stay for a very long time due to its ubiquity for decades anyway.