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snappy-c: Bindings to Google's Snappy: A fast compression library

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Snappy is a fast (de)compression library. It is written in C++, but a basic set of C bindings is also provided. Although the C bindings only support the "raw" Snappy format, this package provides support for the Snappy "frame" format on top of the raw C API, enabling extremely fast (de)compression of lazy (streamed) data.

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Versions [RSS] 0.1.0, 0.1.1, 0.1.2
Change log CHANGELOG.md
Dependencies base (>=4.14 && <4.22), bytestring (>=0.10 && <0.13), conduit (>=1.3.5 && <1.4), crc32c (>=0.2.2 && <0.3), data-default (>=0.7 && <0.9), mtl (>=2.2.2 && <2.4), optparse-applicative (>=0.18 && <0.20), snappy-c [details]
Tested with ghc ==8.10.7, ghc ==9.2.8, ghc ==9.4.8, ghc ==9.6.7, ghc ==9.8.4, ghc ==9.10.3, ghc ==9.12.2
License BSD-3-Clause
Author Finley McIlwaine, Edsko de Vries
Maintainer finley@well-typed.com
Category Codec
Source repo head: git clone https://github.com/well-typed/snappy-c
Uploaded by EdskoDeVries at 2025-11-15T07:55:38Z
Distributions NixOS:0.1.1
Reverse Dependencies 1 direct, 3 indirect [details]
Executables snappy-cli
Downloads 228 total (2 in the last 30 days)
Rating 2.0 (votes: 1) [estimated by Bayesian average]
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Status Docs uploaded by user
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Readme for snappy-c-0.1.2

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snappy-c

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Haskell bindings to the C API of Snappy: A fast compression library.

Usage

[!IMPORTANT] To use this package, you must have the Snappy library installed and visible to cabal.

If your build fails with a message like:

Error: cabal-3.10.1.0: Missing dependency on a foreign library:
* Missing (or bad) C library: snappy

You need to explicitly configure the include and library paths via cabal. One way to do so is to add something like this to your cabal.project configuration:

package snappy-c
  extra-include-dirs:
    /path/to/snappy/include
  extra-lib-dirs:
    /path/to/snappy/lib

In my case, on a mac using homebrew, the following suffices:

package snappy-c
  extra-lib-dirs:
    /opt/homebrew/lib
  extra-include-dirs:
    /opt/homebrew/include

We wouldn't need to do this if the Snappy library supported pkg-config configuration, but as of writing they do not.

Installing Snappy

The Snappy library is available most package managers.

Homebrew

brew install snappy

APT

apt-get install libsnappy-dev

Performance

snappy-c stays true to the speedy spirit of Snappy compression.

The package includes a benchmark suite that compares the compression, decompression, and roundtrip performance of this package against

Run the benchmarks with:

cabal run bench-snappy-c -- --time-limit 5 -o bench.html

[!IMPORTANT] To build the benchmarks, you will need to set extra-include-dirs and extra-lib-dirs for the snappy package as you did for snappy-c (see Usage).

Here's a screenshot from the generated bench.html file:

benchmark results

snappy-cli performance

See snappy-cli/README.md for a demonstration of the performance of this library in a CLI tool.