TS Zip
Shares rank 9 of 14 compression tools by recommenders
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.
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.
14 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 9
- criticize it
- 5
- approval share
- 64%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 9 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 1.8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong results on text benchmarks
“Looks like it beats everything in the large text compression benchmark for enwik8, but loses to several programs for enwik9.”
Comment from 12 Jan 2026 in “Fabrice Bellard's TS Zip” “For something close to the state of the art see e.g. Fabrice Bellard (of course) ts_zip”
Comment from 20 Jun 2026 in “Data Compression Explained” Beats xz on English text
“while impressive, it's a very specific case of compression: english text”
Comment from 13 Jan 2026 in “Fabrice Bellard's TS Zip” “still beats xz by a solid margin”
Comment from 22 Sep 2026 in “Can gzip be a language model?”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Model and code size not counted
“"compressed size" does not seem to include the size of the model and the code to run it”
Comment from 12 Jan 2026 in “Fabrice Bellard's TS Zip” “This program here however is pre-trained and shipped with a model.”
Comment from 12 Jan 2026 in “Fabrice Bellard's TS Zip” “159228453 bytes, which is bigger than uncompressed enwiki8”
Comment from 12 Jan 2026 in “Fabrice Bellard's TS Zip”
Other compression tools people recommend
The four most recommended other compression tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zstandard (zstd) | 111 | 14 | 89% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Brotli | 24 | 18 | 57% | 7 | — | — |
| gzip | 23 | 13 | 64% | 8 | — | — |
| tar | 19 | 13 | 59% | 11 | — | — |
| TS ZipThis page | 9 | 5 | 64% | 5 | — | — |
What people said
11 of the 14 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“still beats xz by a solid margin”
“For something close to the state of the art see e.g. Fabrice Bellard (of course) ts_zip”
“It's just an "experiment" and should never be used in production, but very smart.”
“compress really well they are extremely slow compared to say zstd”
“while impressive, it's a very specific case of compression: english text”
“so barely 2 or 3 times better than xz not really worth it”
“159228453 bytes, which is bigger than uncompressed enwiki8”
“This program here however is pre-trained and shipped with a model.”
“I love this because it gets to the heart of information theory.”
“Looks like it beats everything in the large text compression benchmark for enwik8, but loses to several programs for enwik9.”
“"compressed size" does not seem to include the size of the model and the code to run it”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.