The LZ4 algorithm aims to provide a good trade-off between speed and compression ratio.

The first field represents the number of literal bytes that are to be copied to the output.

Higher compression ratios can be achieved by investing more effort in finding the best matches.

There are ports and bindings in various languages including Java, C#, Rust, and Python.

[14] LZ4 is also supported by the newer zstd command line utility by Yann Collet, as well as a 7-Zip fork called 7-Zip-zstd.