Support for zstd

[JamieMagee]

What is the problem this feature will solve?

zstd and the application/zstd media type were standardized in 2018 in RFC8478 (and refined in RFC8878). In the context of the web, support is becoming more widespread:

Browsers

• Chrome
  • Issue 1246971: Implement zstd content-encoding
  • Expected to land in 117
• Firefox
  • Bug 1301878: Implement support for Zstandard (zstd)
  • Still under discussion

Web servers

• Caddy
  • Available in v2
• Nginx
  • Available as a module

Tools

• cUrl
  • Available in 7.72.0
• wget2
  • Available in 1.99.2

What is the feature you are proposing to solve the problem?

Add support for zstd compression in Node's zlib module.

What alternatives have you considered?

No response

[github-actions]

There has been no activity on this feature request for 5 months and it is unlikely to be implemented. It will be closed 6 months after the last non-automated comment.

For more information on how the project manages feature requests, please consult the feature request management document.

[JamieMagee]

I think this is still relevant as the 22 👍 reactions (and counting) shows.

[bricss]

Zstd Content-Encoding will start shipping 🚢 soon in modern web browsers, and its support in Node could be very handy, imo 🙄

[yyfearth]

available in in Chrome 121 now. Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br, zstd

[JamieMagee]

Support is also being tracked on caniuse: https://caniuse.com/zstd

[jkrems]

Potential PR for basic support (no custom dictionaries): #52100

[github-actions]

There has been no activity on this feature request for 5 months. To help maintain relevant open issues, please add the never-stale Mark issue so that it is never considered stale label or close this issue if it should be closed. If not, the issue will be automatically closed 6 months after the last non-automated comment.
For more information on how the project manages feature requests, please consult the feature request management document.

[skhaz]

Keep

[vejo2]

Having made comparisons between compression methods for internal communication between serverless functions
zstd has proven to have one huge advantage over deflate and gzip:
client side decompression for large blocks is MUCH faster then inflate or gunzip.
Similar to br for a blob written once and read many times for this usecase there is an overall gain using zstd.
Please keep this feature request for basic support.

[255kb]

Not only clients like Chrome added support for zstd, but also CDNs like Cloudflare. They recently activated it automatically when "zstd" is present in the Accept-encoding header.
It could be really useful to have it as part of zlib.

[bjohansebas]

In which versions of Node.js will this feature be available?

[JamieMagee]

Likely v24, which is scheduled to be released in April 2025.

EDIT: looks like it's also going to be included in v23.8.0.