# TS Zip

9 Hacker News commenters recommended TS Zip and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Experimental compressor by Fabrice Bellard that people say beats xz and top enwik8 entries on English text. Critics say it is very slow and not for production.

## Why people recommend it

- Strong results on text benchmarks (2 comments): "Looks like it beats everything in the large text compression benchmark for enwik8, but loses to several programs for enwik9." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594689)) "For something close to the state of the art see e.g. Fabrice Bellard (of course) ts_zip" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48610839))
- Beats xz on English text (2 comments): "while impressive, it's a very specific case of compression: english text" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46598490)) "still beats xz by a solid margin" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49797994))

## What people warn about

- Model and code size not counted (3 comments): ""compressed size" does not seem to include the size of the model and the code to run it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46594347)) "This program here however is pre-trained and shipped with a model." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595188)) "159228453 bytes, which is bigger than uncompressed enwiki8" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595209))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Zstandard (zstd)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zstd.md): 111 recommend
- [Brotli](https://hackerapproved.com/p/brotli.md): 24 recommend
- [gzip](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gzip.md): 23 recommend
- [tar](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tar.md): 19 recommend
- [NNCP](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nncp.md): 15 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "TS Zip", https://hackerapproved.com/p/ts-zip/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).