Bzip3 compresses text archives to one-sixth the size of bzip2

Bzip2 is nearly 30 years old, but its new successor just squeezed a Perl source archive down to one-sixth of bzip2's size while decompressing twice as fast.

Developer Kamila Szewczyk released bzip3, a spiritual successor to bzip2 that pairs a fast Burrows-Wheeler transform with LZ77 string matching and context modeling. In a benchmark compressing every release of Perl 5 into a single archive, bzip2 shrank the data to 3.44 GB. Bzip3 packed that same file into 546 MB, decompressing in 4 minutes 6 seconds compared to bzip2's 9 minutes 22 seconds. The project picked up 366 points on Hacker News.

Why it matters: Standard tools like xz and zstd usually force a choice between speed and file size. Bzip3 excels at text and source code, delivering smaller files than xz without the painful decompression wait.

Try it / know this: On macOS, run brew install bzip3. Per-thread speeds reach roughly 17 MiB/s for compression on x64 Linux clang builds. Note that the author warns to keep backups, as complex compression algorithms can harbor rare edge-case bugs.

Your giant code tarballs don't have to take up half your drive anymore.