TARC STRIKE

The Advanced Real-time Compressor — Solid-block compression archiver with native LZMA2, ZSTD, Brotli, LZ4/HC, and STORE codecs.

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Features

Capability	Description
5 codecs	LZMA2, ZSTD, Brotli, LZ4/HC, STORE — per-file auto-select or override
Solid blocks	Up to 1 GB chunks for maximum ratio
Deduplication	XXH64 content hash — identical files stored once
Self-extracting	--sfx creates standalone .exe archives
Streaming	Files larger than RAM compress without loading fully
SIMD	AVX2, SSE4.2, NEON for buffer ops and checksums
Anti-OOM	Auto-detects RAM, caps dictionary/window/buffer
Integrity	xxHash checksums on every chunk, verified on extract
Security	Path traversal protection, filename validation
Portable	macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon), Linux, Windows

Quick Start

# Create an archive
tarc -c7 backup.strk docs/ images/

# Extract everything
tarc -x backup.strk

# Extract only .txt files
tarc -x backup.strk "*.txt"

# List contents
tarc -l backup.strk

# Test integrity
tarc -t backup.strk

Install

macOS (Homebrew)

# Coming soon: brew install tarc

Linux (deb/rpm)

# Coming soon: apt install tarc / dnf install tarc

Download binary

Get pre-built binaries from the Releases page:

Platform	File
Linux x86_64	tarc-<version>-linux-x86_64
macOS Universal	tarc-<version>-macos-universal
Windows x64	tarc-<version>-windows-x64.exe

Build from source

Requires: libzstd, liblz4, liblzma, libbrotli (enc+dec+common), xxhash (bundled)

# macOS
brew install zstd lz4 xz brotli
make

# Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)
sudo apt install libzstd-dev liblz4-dev liblzma-dev libbrotli-dev
make

# Windows (MinGW)
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-{zstd,lz4,xz,brotli}
make

See docs/installation.md for detailed instructions.

Compression Levels

-c1  to  -c9    Balance speed and ratio
-c10 to -c19    Extreme presets (large dictionary, btultra strategy)
-cfast          Alias for -c1
-cbest          Alias for -c19

Default level is 7.

Codec Override

By default TARC selects the best codec per file type. Override with:

--zstd          Good for mixed/binary data
--lzma          Best ratio (default)
--lz4           Fastest compression/decompression
--brotli        Good for text
--store         No compression

Performance

Benchmarked on 10 MB data (macOS x86_64, single thread):

Codec	Level	Compress (MB/s)	Decompress (MB/s)	Ratio (text)
LZ4	1	33	26	99.5%
LZ4	7	21	44	99.6%
ZSTD	1	30	39	100.0%
ZSTD	7	29	20	100.0%
ZSTD	19	16	24	100.0%
Brotli	1	23	26	100.0%
Brotli	7	26	31	100.0%
LZMA2	1	14	25	100.0%
LZMA2	7	4	33	100.0%
LZMA2	19	5	24	100.0%
STORE	—	30	37	0.0%

Run the full suite: python3 bench/benchmark.py

Documentation

Resource	Description
Usage Guide	Full CLI reference with examples
Codec Guide	Codec details, tuning, trade-offs
Installation	Build from source on all platforms
Format Spec	.strk archive binary format
Man Page	man tarc
Development	Build, test, fuzz, contribute

Project Structure

├── src/            # Source code
│   ├── main.cpp    # Entry point, CLI parsing
│   ├── engine.cpp  # Compression, decompression, codecs
│   ├── io.cpp      # Archive I/O, TOC read/write
│   ├── ui.cpp      # Terminal UI, progress bar
│   └── sfx_stub.cpp # SFX self-extracting stub
├── include/        # Headers
├── test/           # Doctest-based test suite
├── fuzz/           # Fuzz target + OSS-Fuzz config
├── bench/          # Benchmark suite
└── docs/           # Documentation website

Testing

make test          # Run all 38 test cases
make ASAN=1 test   # Compile and run with AddressSanitizer + UBSan
make fuzz          # Build fuzz target (or: make fuzz && ./fuzz_archive seed/)

Fuzzing

A libFuzzer target exercises archive parsing with random data:

# With libFuzzer (LLVM Clang)
make fuzz && ./fuzz_archive corpus/

# Standalone mode (Apple Clang)
make fuzz && ./fuzz_archive seed1.bin seed2.bin

OSS-Fuzz configuration is in fuzz/ossfuzz/.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.