The LLVM project will begin offering Zstd-compressed archives of their binaries in addition to the existing XZ-compressed releases. LLVM developers are finding Zstd working out great with "significantly reduced" download sizes.

[1]Zstd sure is wonderful and LLVM is finally setting up Zstd-compressed binary archives to be published of their releases alongside the existing assets. In the [2]issue ticket opened last year in seeing Zstd-compressed releases, the LLVM Linux x64 build as a XZ package was 1577MB but dropped to 1401MB when using Zstd compression. The macOS binaries also saw similarly sized savings by leveraging the Zstandard compression.

With continuing to offer the XZ archives for anyone on legacy systems or scripting just expecting to find the .tar.xz of new releases, the addition of .tar.zst packages to LLVM releases is a no brainer though hopefully with time they will be able to focus exclusively on just the Zstd package to reduce bloat.

[3]This commit yesterday to LLVM Git updated their release process for providing the Zstd archives on new GitHub releases.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Zstd

[2] https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/164537

[3] https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/4d23acde98acb72e103d8c999edf752a9317aced